


They Have To Take You In

by Alex51324



Series: Finding Home--the Dreaded Bonding AU [1]
Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Alternate Universe - Sentinels and Guides Are Known, M/M, Sentinel/Guide Bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-01
Updated: 2013-09-01
Packaged: 2017-12-25 08:34:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 71,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/950988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alex51324/pseuds/Alex51324
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>First story of the Dreaded Bonding AU.</p>
<p>Do I really need a summary? You either like these things or you don't...in yet another universe where Sentinel and Guides are known, and Guides are oppressed, Jim and Blair find each other and forge a partnership. Slash.</p>
<p>Contains some brief depictions of torture, one sex scene, and a whole lot o'swearing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	They Have To Take You In

**Author's Note:**

> This story was originally posted on LJ back in November 2010; I'm re-posting here now apropos of the new Dreaded Bonding AU/Avengers crossover I just finished. 
> 
> Thanks to Simplystars for beta and cheerleading help! 
> 
> Title from Robert Frost's "Death of the Hired Man."

“Ellison’s on my list for a case review next week,” Lorelei said, careful to keep her tone level. This was going to make her career, if she could pull it off.

“Ellison. Right, don’t worry about it if you can’t get him to take a Guide—none of the others have managed it, either,” Mr. Dench said dismissively. “He’s a stubborn son of a bitch.”

“Actually, Sir, I have an idea about that.”

“Do you.” He sounded more amused than curious.

“It’s a little…unorthodox.” 

“Please, do tell.” He sounded bored, but Lorelei would show him.

“Sandburg,” she said, taking out the folder with the Guide’s case file in it. “They’re a perfect match on all the tests—100% compatible, straight across the board.”

“Well, that certainly is unorthodox. No, Lori, that won’t work. For one thing, Sandburg hasn’t even broken yet. And he’ll need a month of re-training after he does break, before we can even think of sending him back out with a Sentinel.”

“That’s where the unorthodox part comes in,” Lorelei explained. “Look, what we normally do with the tough ones is handle them with unrelenting severity until they break. After the renegade completely submits, the trainer can start to reward his obedience with kindness. Right?”

“I know how we train renegades, Miss Marks.” 

“Of course you do, sir.” She blushed. “But the regular procedure hasn’t worked on Sandburg. He’s been broken, what, three times? And each time it takes him two months to recover enough to work, and almost as soon as he’s assigned to a Sentinel he starts acting out again, and after two or three months of work he’s back again for retraining. His longest time in the field is just under eleven weeks. He’s never even come close to Bonding.”

“I’m familiar with the case.”

“As stubborn as he is, sir, I don’t see how he’s ever going to Bond with a Sentinel that he sees as having any relationship with us, with the training we put him through here. And Ellison, on the other hand—he knows that we have to hurt the Guides sometimes, to train them, and his Blessed Protector instincts are so strong—they’re off the chart, really—that he can’t stand the thought of us. He only comes in for his case review every year because he has to to keep his job, and he’s on record as saying he’ll never Bond.”

“All the more reason to make sure they never see each other, I should think,” Mr. Dench murmured.

That was what everyone thought, and that was what made Lorelei’s plan so brilliant. “I’ve spoken to the trainer working with Sandburg, and he agrees that if we time things just right, we can get Sandburg to break on Tuesday of this coming week. Right when I’ll be meeting with Mr. Ellison. And because my office will be being fumigated, or painted—we’ll think of some excuse—I’ll have to meet with him in one of the old conference rooms on sublevel three.” The ones that they couldn’t use to meet with Sentinels, because the Sentinels couldn’t stand overhearing what went on in the training suites on the same level.

“He’ll go insane,” Mr. Dench said. “I see what you’re trying to do, and it’s clever—very clever—but Ellison could, frankly, become a serious danger to the staff.”

“He also has the strongest testable rating for control over his instincts—it’s why he’s done as well as he has without a Guide. He’ll be overcome with the need to protect the Guide, but he’ll have enough control to know that he can’t help Sandburg by going on a murderous rampage. We’ll be able to get him to agree to just about anything in exchange for letting him ‘rescue’ Sandburg from us. And Sandburg will see Ellison as his savior.”

“You may be right,” Mr. Dench agreed. “But Sandburg still won’t be trained, and Ellison will insist on taking him home, so we won’t have the opportunity to finish up with him.”

“We’d have to let Ellison take him at first,” Lorelei agreed. “We’ll make sure that Sandburg is _very_ badly hurt—Ellison will have to take care of him for quite some time, and Sandburg will have to let him. They’ll Bond—the circumstances and their instincts will force them to. Then all we have to do is tell them they’ll be separated if Sandburg can’t function as his Guide, and they’ll have no choice but to cooperate with Sandburg’s training.”

Mr. Dench leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers. He seemed to be looking for a flaw in Lorelei’s plan; she knew he wouldn’t find one. “What if it doesn’t work?” was all he could come up with.

“Given their respective psychological profiles, sir, I don’t see how it could fail. But if it does, we aren’t any worse off than before.” 

Having said her piece, all Lorelei could do was wait, her heart in her throat, for her superior’s decision. Finally he said, “Miss Marks, if this works out, I can guarantee that you won’t be an Assistant Case Manager for long. On the other hand, if it blows up in your face…you won’t be an Assistant Case Manager for so much as another day. Are we understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“If you’re comfortable with those terms, then do it.”

#

Standing outside the Guide Training and Assignment Center, Jim looked up at the building with revulsion. It was a perfectly ordinary building—brick, 1970’s architecture, small windows half plugged up with air conditioning units. It could have been an office building, or an elementary school.

It wasn’t. He’d have left if he could, just gotten in his car and drove away, but the last time he’d tried that, Captain Banks had told him in no uncertain terms that if he missed his required appointments with G-TAC, he could consider himself suspended without pay until they granted him another appointment and he kept it. 

He didn’t have to take a Guide. No one could make him do that. He just had to go into the place, listen to what they had to say, and walk out again. 

He could do this.

Taking one more deep breath, he went inside.

#

Sagging against the shackles, no longer able to keep his feet under him, Blair fought just to raise his head and look his tormentor in the eye. “Why are you--”

“Silent!” Another blow took his breath away for a moment.

As soon as his breath returned, he continued, “—doing this to me?”

The smarter ones, the more experienced ones, they just didn’t answer. Didn’t engage, just kept demanding behaviors and hurting him when he didn’t present them. This one was newer, though, and hadn’t learned yet. “Because you need to learn your place. You were disobedient and surly with your Sentinel. We need to break your bad habits and replace them with good ones.”

“No,” Blair said, spitting blood. “Why are _you_ doing _thi_ s?” He wasn’t asking “why me?” He knew why it was him. But he’d never gotten a satisfactory answer from a trainer about why _them_. 

The trainer hit him again, this time a stinging slap to his face. “Be silent unless you’re spoken to.”

“Make me.”

The trainer did.

#

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Ellison. They just put down new carpet in my office upstairs, and this was the only room that was available.” 

His case worker was a new one, a young woman named Lorelei Marks. She seemed nice enough; a perfectly ordinary office worker. Not for the first time, he wondered what made someone want to work in a place like this. 

It was the first time he’d been down to the sub-levels of the building. Unlike upstairs, where the ugliness of the place was hidden behind bland, ordinary office furnishings, this level looked like a prison, with concrete walls and heavy reinforced doors. 

They weren’t heavy enough to shield what was going on behind them from Sentinel hearing. Miss Marks, though, seemed unaware that down the hall, some poor bastard was having the shit beaten out of him. Jim wondered if she knew—she couldn’t hear, of course, but did she know what they did down here? Was it possible to work here and not know? 

The room they were sitting in looked almost like one of their interrogation rooms, down at the station: single-bulb overhead light, table, two chairs on opposite sides of it. It smelled the same, too, like industrial cleaning products and fear. 

“I understand you’ve been reluctant to engage a Guide in the past, Mr. Ellison,” Marks was saying. “Can I ask what brought you here today?”

“I won’t be engaging one today, either. My captain insisted I come down.”

“Well, let’s see if we can change your mind.”

Jim barely listened as she went over profiles of Guides who had “tested as highly compatible with you, Mr. Ellison.” While she talked about their talents, hobbies, and attributes, he listened to the Guide down the hall. 

They were going at him—her?—with some kind of whip or strap, the blows coming so fast that the Guide couldn’t catch his breath. When the trainer stopped—out of breath himself—the Guide said thickly, “…bes’ you c’n ‘oo?”

It was a man, and he was just about done in. So brave, but Jim could hear the exhaustion in his voice, the desperation. Under the table, Jim’s hands clenched involuntarily into fists. If there was any real justice, he’d be putting a stop to these people, not chatting with them. But he had to stay calm. Just stay calm, and get out. Stay calm, and get out. 

“—cup of coffee?” Miss Marks was asking. He wasn’t sure if he nodded, but she seemed to take whatever response he’d given as assent. “I’ll just run up and get some for us—you can look over the files while I’m gone.” 

On the way to the door, she paused. “Mr. Ellison?”

“Yes?”

“It would be best if you stayed in this room. There are some training suites on this floor, and it can be upsetting for the Sentinels. I’m sure you understand. Back in a tick!”

Upsetting. That was one word for it. He looked at the profiles, each accompanied by an 8x10 photo and a gruesome sort of resume. Jeff, for instance, was fluent in three languages, a gourmet cook, and sexually submissive with both males and females. Rachel was familiar with all standard office software as well as law enforcement databases, skilled in therapeutic massage, and a virgin who hoped to one day bear her Sentinel’s child. 

Jim wondered if any of them had spent time in the training suites, and what kind of cheerful little descriptions they’d put in the poor bastard down the hall’s profile. 

He was sobbing now, down the hall. “No—no, don’, I won’, please, do--” A shrill, inhuman cry ripped through sublevel three as the Guide screamed like a dying rabbit.

Without conscious thought, Jim found himself on his feet and running down the hall. He burst through the door of the “training suite,” just as the trainer himself was leaving through another door. 

For a split second, he wavered between tending the injured Guide and going after the assailant. But a soft whimper from the Guide made the decision for him. He hurried to the Guide’s side, chanting, “It’s all right, it’s all right,” as he unfastened the manacles that held him spread-eagled against the wall. 

Some detached part of his mind knew that it was not at all all right. The man was covered in bruises and welts, and three fingers on his right hand were bent back and twisted, obviously broken. It had to have been those injuries that had forced that horrible scream from his throat. They were so new, Jim could see the fingers swelling up like sausages before his eyes. 

But except for that one, small, clinical part of his mind, Jim was focused on caring for the Guide. Scanning the room for danger, he quickly pulled the Guide into a protective embrace and settled both of them in the corner farthest from the door. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” he kept saying as the Guide sobbed and whimpered. 

As the Guide’s crying quieted and his heart rate slowed, and no further danger presented itself, Jim slowly renewed his acquaintance with reason. 

He almost wished he hadn’t. There was no way he could protect this Guide—sitting in the corner of the training suite shielding him with his body was not a long-term solution. But it had been bad enough when the Guide was an abstraction, suffering at the end of the hall. Now that the other man—hardly more than a kid, really—was huddled up against him in his arms, he could no more walk away and leave him there than he could rip out his liver and leave that in G-TAC.

It was an impossible situation, and when the door opened and Lorelei peered in, he was almost glad to find that his instincts took over and left him responding with a primal growl. 

He only regretted it because the Guide in his lap cringed. “It’s okay,” Jim told him again. “It’s all right. You’re doing fine, Chief. Not mad at you. Here.” He struggled out of his jacket and wrapped it around the kid’s shoulders. The Guide was naked, and while most of his trembling had to be from fear and shock, covering him up would help a little. “There. That’s it.” Should he try to set the fingers? They looked bad, probably multiple fractures. And setting them would hurt. No, he decided, it could wait. The Guide was clinging to Jim with his uninjured hand, and didn’t look like he could handle any more pain than he was in right now. 

The kid was trying to say something, now. “Whuh. Whuh,” was all he could manage.

“Who am I?” Jim guessed. “My name’s Jim. I’m a Sentinel.”

The Guide coughed and spat some blood onto the floor near them. “Puh—p’eez,” he managed to get out, sounding like he was begging.

_Please._ “What?” _Anything, Chief, anything you want—just let me find a way to get you out of here first._ The thought surprised him. When had he decided that? But he didn’t have to decide, any more than he had had to decide to act when he heard that scream, that he wasn’t leaving G-TAC without this Guide.

“He’p?”

“Yeah. Yeah, Chief, I’m going to help. I just haven’t figured out how yet. Any ideas?”

Jim wasn’t too surprised when the Guide didn’t answer. He sat there, clinging to the Guide, the Guide clinging to him, for a few minutes, until they were interrupted by a tap at the door. “Mr. Ellison?” Lorelei Marks called. 

He took a few deep breaths, reassuring the Guide and schooling himself to respond rationally. “Yes?”

“May we come in?”

We? “You, and who else?”

“Guide Sandburg’s trainer.”

The Guide in his arms let out a whimper of protest. “No. Only you. And don’t touch him.”

Lorelei came into the room, carefully staying out of arm’s reach. “Mr. Ellison, I know it must be upsetting for you to see this part of the training process,” Lorelei said. Jim recognized her tone, or rather her lack of tone—she was trying very hard not to let some emotion show in her voice. The question was, which one? “Guide Sandburg has been a very difficult case, and unfortunately the training staff have had to be very severe with him.”

“No shit,” Jim growled. 

Lorelei smiled tightly. “It does happen that he’s very compatible with you. If you’d be interested in him, we could notify you when his training is complete.”

“When?”

“Training will probably take another month or two.”

“Not acceptable.” If Sandburg looked this bad now, who knew what they’d do to him in another month? 

“If you’d like to put him down, we could discuss the timetable in more comfortable surroundings.”

“No.” He wasn’t letting go of the Guide until he had him back in his own territory. His apartment, that was. Where he could keep him safe. “He’s mine.”

“Mr. Ellison, he is not yours. He’s under G-TAC’s control. In fact, if you leave now and come upstairs, the strong emotions you’re feeling right now will begin to fade almost immediately.”

On one level, Jim knew she was right. He had a strong drive to protect Guides, even unattached ones or other Sentinels’ Guides. This Guide’s obvious distress was affecting him on an instinctive level. 

On another level, however, what she was saying as an obscenity, a blasphemy. “No,” he growled. 

“If you’ll just give the matter a little time, Mr. Ellison, we can keep working on Sandburg’s training, and if you still feel so strongly about him--”

“I said _no_!” If the Guide hadn’t been in his lap, he’d have thrown himself at her. 

But Sandburg was there, and he was struggling to sit up. “J-Jim?”

When he looked down at his Guide, meeting his eyes, Lorelei, the room, the whole rest of G-TAC might as well not have existed. “Yeah, Chief?”

“Whas’ happening?”

“I don’t know, Chief. I’m not going to let them hurt you again.” 

The kid was clearly fighting to stay lucid, not to pass out from shock or start screaming or crying again. “Why?”

_Because you’re mine._ But Lorelei was right, the Guide wasn’t his. And the way the kid was looking at him, those pale blue eyes boring into him, it was like there was something riding on this answer. Sandburg wasn’t just looking for reassurance. “Because it’s wrong,” Jim said. “And because when we get out of here, I’d like you to be my Guide, if you’ll have me.”

Sandburg rested bonelessly against him for a moment before he said softly, “I don’ wanna Bond. I’ll guide ya, but I don’ wanna Bond.”

The primal Sentinel in him growled a protest at that, but Jim forced it down. “Okay. That’s fine, we’ll do it that way.” Less than an hour ago, he hadn’t wanted to Bond, either. Still didn’t really. Not the part of him that made the decisions. 

“…nice ‘o me?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll be nice to you, Chief. Don’t worry about that.”

“My han’ hur’s.” 

“I know it does. I’m going to get it taken care of real soon.” 

“’anks Jim.” 

The little Guide was fading out, into something between unconsciousness and natural sleep. With as much pain as he was in, he must be exhausted to be able to doze off like that. 

Exhausted, and feeling safe for the first time in God knew how long. 

The door opened with a soft _click_ , and Lorelei came back in. Jim hadn’t even noticed she left. She had a blanket over one arm, which she carefully slid across the floor to him. “I thought you might want to…”

“Yeah. Thanks.” Carefully, he tucked his Guide— _the_ Guide—into it, removing the jacket and folding it up to serve as a pillow, instead. The woman didn’t offer anything else, so finally he said, “What happens now?”

“What do you want to have happen?” she asked kindly.

“I’m taking him with me. Today.”

She nodded. “You understand that’s a considerable departure from procedure.”

“I don’t care.”

She gave him an understanding smile. “But we do appreciate how upsetting this has been for you. We should never have brought you into this part of the building.”

That was not at all the part of this that should never have happened, but Jim controlled himself. Getting Sandburg out of here was the important thing. If he had to play along, just a little, to accomplish that…he would play along.

“I’ve spoken with the Director, and while he doesn’t like the idea, he’s willing to agree to let you take the Guide with you, on a trial basis.”

There was only one important part of that sentence. He was taking Sandburg with him. “Okay.”

“You’ll have to work with us in monitoring his progress and completing his training, and there are several waivers you’ll have to sign. The Director’s assistant is working on them now.”

He nodded. Yes, yes, he’d sign anything.

“It looks like he’s resting comfortably now—perhaps this would be a good time to go upstairs and take care of those forms?”

Jim looked down at the Guide. He didn’t want to leave him alone in this place, even for a second. 

“I promise, no harm will come to him. We’ll have the both of you on your way in, say, twenty minutes?”

Twenty minutes, and he’d be right in the building. “All right,” he finally agreed, easing Sandburg off of his lap and tucking the blanket more closely around him. “Be right back, Chief,” he whispered to the Guide.

#

Once she had the big Sentinel tied up with the Director’s secretary, waiting for those damned forms they had to pretend Sally was drawing up on the spot, Lorelei ducked into her soundproofed inner office and got Charlie, Sandburg’s trainer, on the interoffice phone. “Break the rest of his fingers,” she ordered, without preamble.

“Ma’am?” The trainer sounded confused.

“The little shit said he doesn’t want to Bond, and Ellison agreed,” she explained, angry that she _had_ to explain. That was one thing that would change once she had her promotion. “I want him completely helpless. If Ellison has to feed him and wipe his ass, they’ll Bond whether they like it or not.”

“Are you joking? He’ll rip me apart with his bare hands!”

“He’s up here,” she said impatiently. “Just do it, fast, and lock yourself in your office until he’s gone if you’re scared of him.” 

“I really don’t think that’s necessary, Miss Marks,” Charlie said. “They seemed pretty attached—I was watching on the closed-circuit. And Ellison, he’ll go completely primal.”

“It’s my decision, and if you want to keep your job, you’ll do as I say.”

She waited, until Charlie finally said, “Yes, _Ma’am_.”

#

Blair woke, suddenly, when the door opened. That sound had signaled pain and terror for so long that it had him instantly on the alert. 

The Sentinel was gone—if it hadn’t been for the blanket around him, and the fact that he was no longer shackled to the wall, Blair would have thought it had all been a dream, or a hallucination brought on by severe pain. This was the first time, in all his sessions, that the trainers had done anything that could cause permanent damage. Up until now, it had all been soft tissue injuries—beatings, burns, electric shocks. Coupled with starvation, thirst, and sleep deprivation, those were bad enough. And the psychological tricks, of course—keeping him naked, confusing his sense of day and night, stress positions, the occasional kindness meant to throw him off his guard.

Maybe that was what the Sentinel had been. Some kind of a trick. That made more sense, was more likely than…that that a Sentinel really wanted to help him.

Before he could think about it any longer, the trainer covered the few steps over to him. “Crazy bitch,” he murmured, grabbing Blair’s uninjured hand. 

He struggled to free himself, but he was too weak. The trainer forced all four of his fingers back, snapping them with a sickening _crunch_ that had Blair screaming, and then, when the pain hit, flailing over onto his stomach with dry heaves. Without a good hand to support himself with, he was lying face down in his own bile and spit, but that was better than drowning in the stuff. 

Still holding on to his hand, the trainer gave his thumb a vicious twist until it, too, broke. He barely noticed when the trainer half stood up, hesitated, then said, “Fuck it,” and bolted out the door.

This, Blair thought through a haze of pain, this might do it for him. Pain, he could handle. But those were his _hands_. If they weren’t set properly—and he knew that wasn’t going to happen for free—he wouldn’t be able to type, write—hell, he wouldn’t even be able to hold a fork. 

The other door, the one the big Sentinel had come through—crashed open with a boom like the wrath of God. He managed to raise his head between heaves—it was the Sentinel again. Jim. He screamed, with a sound of animalistic rage, and threw himself against the door through which the trainer had disappeared. 

After pounding at the door and screaming for a few more seconds, the Sentinel stopped, as suddenly as he’d arrived, and dropped to his knees beside Blair, his tone as gentle as a mother with a newborn. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have left. I shouldn’t have believed her—we’re going, now.”

He carefully eased Blair up by his shoulders, taking care to avoid jarring his injured hands. “What?” Blair asked intelligently. If the Sentinel was in on it, was helping them break him, he wasn’t going anywhere with him.

Except that he apparently was, because the Sentinel was lifting him into his arms, cradling him like a groom carrying his bride across the threshold. “Can you get your arms up against your chest? Don’t worry about hanging on, just keep them stable. That’s it.”

Tucking his arms up against his chest was a good idea, but it was painful. He grayed out, and when he was next aware of his surroundings, they were up on one of the higher levels, the ones with carpet, and his Sentinel was yelling. “—long enough for you to break every goddamn bone in his body? Fax the papers to the station. Have them delivered to my house. Cram them up your ass for all I care about the goddamn papers!”

Then they were moving again. A set of glass double doors loomed in front of them. Blair wondered if they were just going to crash through them, but at the last second, the Sentinel turned to shove them open with his shoulder, and they were outside, in the first sunlight Blair had seen in at least a month. 

“It’s okay,” Jim was saying. “I’ll get you home, it’ll all be okay. First we need the car. Here it is. Careful, I’m not going to drop you.”

Jim didn’t drop him, but being heaved into the passenger seat of the big truck jarred his broken bones; Blair imagined the rough ends grinding against one another. He must have screamed a little, because the Sentinel growled, going alert and looking around them for a moment. “It’s okay,” he said again. “Okay. Okay. Right there.” He slammed the door beside Blair, and a moment later reappeared, getting into the truck on the other side. “Home, I have to get you home. No. Have to get those hands seen to. I can’t set them myself, you need x-rays. Hospital. Hospital first, then home.” 

Blair gave up on trying to understand what was happening. He held his arms tight against his stomach, trying to keep his hands as still as possible as Jim swerved around corners and stopped short at red lights, and tried to imagine himself outside his body, beyond the pain. None of the meditation techniques he’d learned would stand up to this much pain, but he could try, keep it bearable. 

Oh, God, his hands.

#

The one mercy in the whole terrible day was that as soon as the ER personnel took one look at Sandburg, they rushed him through triage with no waiting, and when Jim managed to get out the key words, “my Guide,” they were quickly detoured into a small, but private, treatment room. He was given just enough time to get Sandburg settled comfortably, and to stake out the most defensible position in the room, before the doctor tapped on the door and asked if Jim was ready for him to come in.

By that time, Sandburg was sitting up on the edge of the gurney, wide-eyed and alert, leaning back against Jim’s chest. The rough blanket from G-TAC was still wrapped around him, and Jim’s jacket was helping to pad his hands on his lap. He shied violently at the doctor’s approach, and Jim’s arms reflexively tightened around him. 

“I’m going to need to touch your Guide to examine him. Is it all right if I start by checking his eyes and ears?” the doctor asked Jim.

“You ready for that, Chief?” Jim asked, looking down at him. “It’s all right, I’ve got you.”

“Okay. Okay, I’m rea’y.” He was speaking a little more clearly now, but was still having some trouble with his hard consonants. Some kind of injury to his mouth, Jim guessed. 

The doctor looked into Sandburg’s ears and had him follow a light with his eyes. “I don’t think there’s any significant head trauma. I’d like to assess his spine next. Can you ask him to make a fist?”

“Can’,” Sandburg said. “Bu’ i’s nuh my spine, i’s my han’s.” 

“His fingers are broken,” Jim explained.

“What about his other hand?”

“Both of them.” 

“Wai’,” Sandburg said, “Can you, move, uh…” 

Jim carefully unwrapped the jacket from around his hands. God, they looked even worse than he had remembered—not just twisted, but badly swollen. He reached for them, meaning to check if circulation was impaired, but hesitated. “Can I?”

After a moment, Sandburg nodded. 

As gently as he could, Jim touched his fingertip to each of Sandburg’s in turn, feeling the tiny, reassuring thrum of the Guide’s pulse in each one. “His circulation’s okay,” Jim reported. “For now, anyway.” 

“That’s very good to know,” the doctor said, with some hint of surprise.

“I had some medic training in the service. I understand that you have to check his for spine injuries and internal bleeding before you move on to the obvious, but can you hurry it up a little? Hey, Chief, show him that you can wiggle your toes.”

Sandburg did. “’is, ‘oo,” he added, wiggling his right thumb. “’as ‘e o’ly one ‘ey didn’ ge’.”

The only one they didn’t get. Jesus. “Here,” Jim said, easing away from Sandburg so that the doctor could get his hands on his spine, but carefully keeping his hands on the Guide’s shoulders. “Be careful, he’s all banged up.”

The doctor quickly pressed along Sandburg’s spine and hips, and palpated his abdomen. The latter produced a small whimper from Sandburg, and had the doctor backing quickly toward the door as if Jim was likely to take a swing at him, but they quickly found that the pain was from the necessity of moving his hands, not from any internal injury. 

“And his respiration is fine,” Jim added. “Shallow and rapid, but that’s the pain. Show him you can take a deep breath, Chief.” The Guide did, and Jim listened carefully to the reassuring sound of his lungs filling with air. “Okay.”

“Okay,” the doctor said, a little taken aback. “We can start him on something for the pain, if that’s all right with you.”

“Yeah, do.” 

“And some IV fluids, for the shock?”

Jim nodded, not entirely sure why the doctor was asking him, instead of telling him. 

“I’ll have the nurse start those, and then as soon as the medication starts to take effect, we’ll get some x-rays of those hands.”

The doctor left, writing something on his chart as he went. “You okay, Chief?” Jim asked, while they were alone for a moment.

“Yeah. Yeah. Hur’s.”

“I know. They’re going to give you something for it in a minute. She’s going to need your arm, though, and that’s going to suck,” Jim warned him. “Which one do you think, right or left?”

Sandburg closed his eyes, letting his head drop against Jim’s shoulder. Jim didn’t think he was going to get an answer, but the Guide finally said, “Right.”

“Okay. Let’s try to get it out where she can get at it—nice and slow.” There was a pillow at the top of the gurney, so he pulled that closer and carefully transferred Sandburg’s right arm from the makeshift pillow on his lap to the real one, and eased it around to his side. “Okay, that’s good. You’re doing great.”

Sandburg spasmed slightly, like he was trying to cough or hiccup. Jim realized after a moment that he was trying to laugh. “No’ doin’ an’ing,” he pointed out.

“That’s okay. You don’t have to.” 

Moments later, the nurse came in. “I have some IV fluids and morphine for your Guide,” she said, speaking slowly and clearly, as if Jim were hard of hearing or didn’t understand English. 

“Good. We’re ready for them,” Jim said, gesturing slightly toward Sandburg’s right arm. 

“Oh, my gosh. He really is in bad shape, isn’t he?” the nurse asked, hanging the bag of fluids and attaching a needle to the tube. 

“Uh-huh.” 

Tearing open a little packet, she held an alcohol wipe just over Sandburg’s arm. “I’m going to have to disinfect the area with this first. Is that all right?”

There was the asking again. “Yes.”

She did that. “Now I have to put the needle in,” she announced, and waited.

“You ready for that, Chief?” Jim asked.

The Guide nodded. He winced a little as the needle slid in, but kept his arm still. Once the needle was taped down, Jim helped him put his arm back in his lap—he seemed to feel better with it there. While they were working on that, the nurse injected the morphine into the IV line. That, for some reason, she didn’t feel the need to tell him about. Saying, “The doctor will be with you again shortly,” she left them alone again.

Moments after the drug hit his bloodstream, Sandburg sighed heavily and went limp in Jim’s arms. “You okay, Chief?”

“Um…be’ur.” 

Better. “Good. Good, the medicine’s working, just relax.” He wondered if he should try to help the Guide lay down. But if the doctor really was coming right back, he might as well stay sitting up, since he’d need to for the x-rays anyway. Jim compromised by trying to settle him in a more comfortable position on his chest. 

When the doctor did finally come back, Sandburg was just about unconscious, and clearly feeling no pain. The doctor arranged his hands into different positions on the portable x-ray machine he’d brought, carefully announcing each action before he performed it, but the Guide barely made a peep through the whole thing. 

“I’ll put a priority on these,” the doctor said, “but processing the images will take a little time. Then we’ll be able to decide whether to operate or just put casts on them.”

Once the doctor had left, Jim shook Sandburg slightly in his arms. “Hey, Chief?”

“Muh?” He opened one eye blearily.

“You want to lie down for a little while?”

“’kay.”

Sandburg didn’t seem to like being flat on his back, so Jim got him settled on his side. There were some blankets piled on a shelf nearby, so he peeled off the G-TAC one—which had stuck to several of the Guide’s wounds—and covered him with one of the new, clean ones. “All right, Chief? Anything else you need?”

Sandburg shook his head slightly, so Jim pulled up a chair and put one hand on the Guide’s shoulder, the other on his hip, and waited.

#

He wasn’t sure that life had ever been quite this good. He was warm, and it was quiet, and most of all, nothing _hurt_. There was—okay, there was a snake made of ice running into his arm, but that wasn’t so bad, really. Once it got eight or ten inches inside him, the ice melted and it was fine. And he had a vague idea that the snake had something to do with why it didn’t hurt. So, yay snake. 

That big Sentinel hadn’t gone anywhere, either. Just sitting next to him, like one of those lions in front of a library. Maybe Blair had pulled a thorn out of his paw, and that was why the lion wasn’t hurting him. “Nice kitty,” he said, and giggled.

“What was that, Chief?”

Right. He’d bitten his tongue earlier, when someone had hit him in the face, and now it was all swollen up like a slug. Ick. He didn’t like slugs, especially in his mouth. He opened his mouth; maybe the lion would see the slug and take it out for him.

“That looks bad. We’ll, uh, we’ll ask the doctor for something to put on that as soon as he comes back.” 

Blair wondered what he wanted to put on the slug. Salt, maybe. That would be better, he supposed, than if the lion picked the slug out of his mouth. He might poke through its skin with his claw, and then Blair would have a mouth full of slug guts.

Also, there was some reason he wanted to keep the slug, but he forgot what it was right now. 

#

“The doctor is still waiting for your Guide’s x-rays to come back,” the nurse told him. “He says it shouldn’t be much longer. They had a few emergencies that had to go ahead of yours.”

“Okay.” Sandburg was resting comfortably now. Jim would still feel better once they were back in his loft, but it wasn’t urgent. “He has this wound on his tongue—looks like he bit it. He showed it to me earlier, when he was awake, so I think it’s bothering him. Something we can do about that?”

“Certainly. We can clean it and put something on it.”

“That’d be great.” 

The nurse disappeared for a moment, then came back with some gauze and a tube of something on a tray. Pulling a rolling stool up to the other side of the gurney, she sat down. “I’ll need to open his mouth.”

“Okay. Let me see if I can do it. Chief? Chief, wake up a minute.” He didn’t stir. “Okay…” Carefully easing his thumb inside the Guide’s mouth, he gently pried the lower jaw down. “Can you get it?”

The nurse caught his tongue with two gauze-wrapped fingers. “Oh, yes, that looks nasty.” Using several more pieces of gauze, she cleared away some chunks of dried blood and matter. “I’ll have to ask doctor to look at it—we might want to put a stitch or two in that.”

Jim nodded. The kid had bitten halfway through his tongue; it was pretty disgusting, actually. He noticed his own tongue curling up in his mouth, as if in sympathetic revulsion.

“We’ll just put some of this on, for now,” she said, dabbing on some stuff from the tube, “and when we send you home we’ll give you some mouth rinse for him to use until it’s healed.” She released Sandburg’s tongue, and Jim helpfully stuffed it back in his mouth. “He could have some ice chips, when he wakes up, if that’s all right with you.”

“Sure. If you could get us some, I’ll give them to him next time he comes around. He’s been in and out.” 

“Of course, I’ll bring some.” The nurse hesitated by the door. “Would you like to have the rest of his wounds cleaned? While you’re waiting for the x-rays?”

“Yeah, that’s a good idea.” It would have to be done, and it would hurt like hell, so they might as well do it while the Guide was so heavily medicated. “As much as we can get to without moving him, anyway.” 

The nurse left and came back with more gauze and more tubes of ointment, plus some washcloths and kidney-shaped pans of water. Each time she touched Sandburg, though, she first asked him if it was all right, and eventually Jim said, in frustration, “Look, if you have to ask me about every little thing, why don’t I just do it myself?”

He knew there was a perfectly good reason why not—insurance, malpractice, hospital regulations—but to his surprise, the nurse said, “If that’s what you’d prefer. Let me know if you need any more supplies.”

So Jim uncovered one segment of Blair at a time, and cleaned and treated everything he could reach. Most of the damage was on his back and shoulders—bruises, burns, whip marks, all in various stages of healing. There were also some bruises across his lower back that told Jim he ought to keep a close eye on the Guide to see if he was pissing blood—when he pissed—and his legs and thighs hadn’t been spared, either. There was also a long, slim burn down the sole of each foot, just beginning to blister. It would hurt like hell if the kid tried to put any weight on it. 

That had probably been the point. 

He wiped down the few unmarked areas with the washcloth, while he was at it—it was going to be a while before Sandburg was in any shape to manage a bath or shower, and it would be good to get the stink of fear off of him. 

Fearful of what he would find there, Jim eased the Guide’s legs apart so that he could check what was between them. The buttocks were heavily bruised, but the anus itself hadn’t been torn, and Jim couldn’t smell any semen or lubricant on him. He hadn’t been raped, then, probably, or at least not recently. 

Something to be grateful for, he thought, his stomach twisting. Sandburg’s penis looked all right, too, but his scrotal sac was dark with bruising. The people who had done this knew what they were doing—they had concentrated on areas where they could cause a great deal of pain, with minimal risk of lasting injury. Except for the hands—those were the anomaly. 

He knew some Guides, the small number who didn’t cooperate with their training, were broken—tortured into submission. He had learned that from Dave, the Guide he’d worked with in the army—his first Guide, sort of. Not that they were Bonded or anything, but they’d been attached to the same unit for almost six months, so they’d gotten to know each other. Dave had been drafted, something that set him apart from the “normals” in their unit, since the draft had been abolished years ago for everyone except Sentinels and Guides. After they’d known each other for a while, Dave had confessed to him how he had been a draft protestor, before his number came up. When he arrived for training, he’d tried passive resistance—going where he was told, but refusing to participate in any of his training. 

In return for that little stunt, he’d spent two and a half weeks locked naked in a freezing-cold, pitch-black room. Three times a day, Dave had said, his trainers came in with food and water, then screamed orders at him, beating him when he failed to comply to their satisfaction. If he did well enough, he was rewarded with the food and water; if not, they were taken away. Only when he’d managed to demonstrate his complete submission had he been let out of the cell and permitted to resume normal training. 

Their unit had been stationed in the desert, and it had been about 106 in the shade that day, but Dave still shivered when he told Jim about it. 

The Guide draft had somehow seemed wrong to him even before he’d met Dave—even though he didn’t object, particularly, to the Sentinel draft; it seemed right, that a Sentinel should serve his country—but it was after hearing Dave’s story that he really began to hate G-TAC.

Jim himself had signed up voluntarily. His father had protested that his connections could keep Jim out of the service if his number came up in the draft lottery, but Jim hadn’t been so sure about that—and hadn’t wanted his father being able to hold that over his head. And he hadn’t really minded the idea of serving his country, either. Signing up earned you the privilege of choosing where you’d serve, and Jim’s high grades coupled with his Sentinel abilities had gotten him a lot of offers. He’d chosen the Army Rangers, and had liked it well enough to do two hitches before he petitioned to be released. Between his voluntary enlistment, his strong service record, and his plans to go into law enforcement, his petition had been granted. The Army could still call him back up if they needed him, but as he got older, that got less and less likely. He had no complaints at all about his own service. 

But then, he’d only had to go through boot camp and, later, Ranger School. Both of those had been tough—Ranger School in particular was supposed to be one of the worst experiences a man could live through, and no one in his training squad had finished without losing twenty pounds and suffering two or three minor injuries—but none of them had looked anywhere near as bad as Sandburg did now. 

Maybe Sandburg was a special case. Jim had heard him, down in sublevel three, mouthing off to his torturer, even though he’d clearly been suffering for days, if not weeks, by that point. Maybe they’d thought they had to do something beyond the norm to break him. 

Belatedly, Jim realized that he’d gotten himself into a hell of a mess. Ever since he’d heard Sandburg scream, his only thought had been how to keep G-TAC from hurting him again. Agreeing to take him as his Guide had been nothing more than a means to that end. 

But now Jim was stuck with him—the only other option he had was to give him back to G-TAC, which was _not_ going to happen. He didn’t want a Guide, and now he had with one that even G-TAC couldn’t make behave. It was going to be a disaster. He’d figure out pretty quick that Jim wasn’t going to beat him or starve him, and then—what? 

What had he done, that G-TAC would do this to him to stop him from doing it again?

It couldn’t just be that he had a mouth on him—could it? Jim could deal with that, if that was all it was. Hell, the kid could say whatever he wanted as far as Jim was concerned. But if he was into, he didn’t know, starting fires or torturing small animals, that would be a problem. 

Would G-TAC have really done this, though, if it was just some ordinary kind of misbehavior?

Maybe. Dave, after all, hadn’t done all that much—at least, it seemed that way to Jim, even though he couldn’t really imagine pulling a stunt like that at boot camp and living to tell the tale—and look what it had gotten him? It could be that Sandburg’s ordeal had started out with something like that, and he’d just refused to break. 

Or maybe he was a real hard case, and was going to murder Jim in his sleep. 

It would be weeks before Sandburg was in any shape to so much as tie his shoes, though, so Jim had some time before he had to start sleeping with one eye open.

Those thoughts fled when a new smell assaulted his nose: an acrid, ammoniac tang, overlaid with the coppery tang of blood. Quickly realizing what had happened, he called for the nurse. “He’s pissed himself, and there’s blood in his urine,” he explained. 

“I’m sure he couldn’t help it,” the nurse said. “He’s very heavily medicated, and we’ve been putting fluids into him—and now we know his kidneys are working.”

“Yeah,” Jim said. “I’m a little more worried about the blood than the piss. Can you get somebody to check out his kidneys?”

“Of course. I’ll call a nephrologist.”

“Thanks.”

After the nurse left, Jim started cleaning up some of the mess. Sandburg stirred slightly. “’im?” He tried again. “Jim?”

“Yeah, Chief?”

“Huh? Oh, shi’ sorry, didn’ mean to…”

“It’s okay,” Jim said. “I know.” 

The Guide faded out again, but came to again when the nurse came into the room. “Jim?” he asked fearfully.

“Yeah, it’s me,” Jim said, patting him, looking a question at the nurse.

“The nephrologist asked me to put in a catheter, so we can collect a urine sample. Is that all right?”

Jim winced. “That okay with you, Chief?”

“Huh?” Sandburg said.

“The catheter,” Jim explained. “They’re no fun, but I think you’d better have it.” 

“Mmm.” 

Jim decided to take that as agreement. “Go ahead,” he told the nurse. “Be careful with him.”

Sandburg’s eyes drifted shut, and he didn’t seem to particularly notice the nurse jamming six inches of plastic tubing up his urethra. 

“We’re going to need some clean sheets and blankets here, too,” Jim said when she was finished, since he was starting to figure out that the hospital staff, for some reason, needed him to point out the obvious. “Maybe you could give me a hand with changing the bed.”

Jim took charge of moving Sandburg out of the way, while the nurse took the soiled linen out from under him and replaced it with fresh. It was impossible to do without jostling the Guide’s injured hands badly enough for the pain to cut through his drugged haze, and the Guide let out a strangled yelp.

“Sorry, sorry.” Maybe they should have just let him lie in his own piss. The smell would have been hard for Jim to deal with, but he wasn’t the one whose hands had just been turned into hamburger. “Easy, there, we’re done,” he said, settling Sandburg back on his side, where he seemed to be the most comfortable. 

“Do you need anything else?” the nurse wanted to know.

Did he? Jim looked around. “Should he have another one of these?” he asked, tapping the nearly-empty IV bag. 

“Yes, he’s still quite dehydrated. The first bag was normal saline. We could do a dextrose solution this time,” she said tentatively. “It would get his blood sugar up a little. If that’s all right with you.”

Jim glanced down at Sandburg. He was still conscious, but didn’t seem to be tracking, so Jim answered for him. “That sounds fine. Is there some reason that wouldn’t be okay with me?” He couldn’t think of one—dextrose solution was just sugar water, nothing a Sentinel would react badly to. 

“No,” the nurse said carefully. “Just checking.”

Belatedly, Jim realized why the hospital staff were being so careful—so annoying—about asking him to approve every little thing they did. Sentinels with injured Guides were notoriously unpredictable. The Guide’s injuries would have his primal, protective instincts right near the surface, and many Sentinels had trouble controlling strong emotions without the help of a Guide. He thought they were going a little too far, but he had to admit that when they’d first arrived, he wouldn’t have reacted well if the doctors and nurses had come in and started _doing things_ to his Guide without letting him know what was going on. 

“Okay,” he said, trying to smile reassuringly, to demonstrate that he was completely in control. “Anything else that might make him more comfortable?” It was likely, he thought, that given the way he had taken over the doctor’s initial examination, they were trying to make him think that everything that was going on was his idea. They probably thought that since Sandburg’s injuries weren’t life-threatening, leaving him in some discomfort was better than risking an out-of-control Sentinel rampaging through their emergency department. 

“He looks a little chilled—we could put a heat lamp on him.”

Right. He should have been able to think of that. “Okay.” If G-TAC had used extreme temperatures to break Sandburg, like they had Dave, being warm would help him to feel safe. “Does that sound good, Chief?”

“Um. Yeah. Cold.” Jim wasn’t sure if the Guide’s speech was getting clearer, or if he was just getting better at mentally adding in the sounds Sandburg couldn’t quite pronounce.

“And—well, we could put more morphine into the next IV bag, so he gets a continuous low dose.”

“More drugs, Chief?” Jim asked. 

“God yes.”

“Okay. Anything else you want?” 

Sandburg wavered for a moment. “’hirs’y,” he finally said.

That one took Jim a moment to figure out—he thought at first that Sandburg was saying it hurt again. “Oh, right. I have some ice chips for you already, I just forgot about ‘em.”

The ice had started to melt, but there were still some decent-sized chunks left. As the nurse left, he rattled the ice in the cup and selected a piece. “Here—hope you don’t mind my fingers.”

Sandburg said something that Jim guessed was “Thanks,” but with his mouth full of ice, he was even harder to understand than usual. 

“No problem, Chief. Let me know when you want more.”

He fed the Guide several more ice chips, interrupted by the nurse coming in with the heat lamp, and then with the new IV bag. Not long after, the nephrologist came in to collect some urine and ultrasound Sandburg’s kidneys. 

“There’s a lot of bruising here, and here,” the doctor said, pointing at some formless blobs on the machine’s screen. “That’s what’s causing the blood. But he’s producing plenty of urine, and it’s looking clearer already. We should keep monitoring him, but if it doesn’t get worse again, I don’t think he’ll need surgery.”

“Good. So I just keep an eye on this?” Jim asked, indicating the tube snaking out from under the blanket to a collection bag. “And if it gets darker, or redder, I’ll let somebody know?”

“Yes.” She hesitated. “Will we be admitting him, or are you taking him home once he’s patched up?”

“I don’t know. I’d like to take him home as soon as possible, if he doesn’t absolutely need to stay.” He had a feeling the hospital would send Sandburg home half-dead if he insisted on it, so he wanted to be clear that he wasn’t going to insist. 

“All right. Yes, if you take him home, you should keep monitoring his outputs—if he stops producing urine, or if it gets bloodier, you’ll need to bring him back or call your doctor. I’ll put everything in the discharge instructions.”

Jim nodded. “Okay, Chief? Any questions?”

“I’m good,” Sandburg said. 

“Okay. Thanks,” he told the nephrologist.

They had a few minutes to themselves, and he gave the Guide a few more ice chips, before the first doctor came back in. “You wanted a wound on his tongue stitched?” he asked, setting out a hypodermic, needle and thread, and yet more gauze on a tray.

“If it needs it, yeah,” Jim said, then noticed that Sandburg had clamped his mouth shut and was turning his head away from the doctor. It wasn’t difficult to figure out that he didn’t want the doctor messing around with his mouth. Jim couldn’t really blame him. “Okay, Chief?”

Sandburg shook his head.

“I know it’s gross, but it’ll heal faster and feel better sooner.” 

The Guide was unmoved by this argument. 

“Will you at least let him look? Maybe it doesn’t even need stitches.”

Sandburg tried to say something without opening his mouth. Jim had absolutely no idea what it was.

“Just let him look. He won’t do anything until you say it’s okay.” 

Sandburg tried to speak again, this time just a little more distinctly. “More ice.”

“Oh, sure.” He fed the Guide another ice chip. “He’ll give you something to numb it first,” Jim explained, guessing at what Sandburg was concerned about. “Right?” he asked the doctor.

“I can. I brought some Novocain,” he added, touching the syringe. 

“That’ll work. And we can ice it again before he gives you the shot,” Jim added.

The Guide finally allowed his tongue to be examined. “Yes, this could use a suture or two,” the doctor said, holding Sandburg’s tongue with one hand and reaching for the syringe with the other.

Sandburg jerked away, and Jim said, “ _Wait_.” 

The doctor jumped away. “ _What_ did we just tell him?” Jim demanded, giving the Guide a reassuring pat at the same time that he glared at the doctor. “Are you going to let him do it, Chief?” he asked gently. 

Sandburg took a few deep breaths, then nodded. “Yeah. Ice?”

“Okay. Here.” Jim gave him the biggest piece of ice they had left. “He’ll tell you when he’s ready for the shot,” he explained to the doctor. 

After a moment, the Guide said, “Ready.”

The doctor looked at Jim for confirmation, and waited for his nod before he proceeded. “He’s not going to be able to speak clearly until the anesthetic wears off,” the doctor explained. “Fifteen or twenty minutes.”

“Okay.”

Jim and the doctor eyed each other across the gurney for a few minutes, until the doctor said, “Is he ready for me to start the sutures?”

“Ask him,” Jim suggested. 

Sandburg was sitting with his tongue half out of his mouth, but his eyes were clear and alert as he watched this exchange. When the doctor repeated, “Is it all right if I start the sutures?”, looking in Sandburg’s general direction, the Guide nodded. 

The stitches themselves took less than a minute. “He’ll need to have them removed in five days or so,” the doctor said as he disposed of the needle and gauze. 

“Okay.” Jim wondered if he ought to be writing these things down. Well, it wasn’t like Sandburg was going to forget his tongue was sewn together, and Jim knew that stitches started to itch when it was time for them to come out, so he probably didn’t have to worry about keeping track of that particular thing. 

Not too much later, two more people came in. One was a small Hispanic man, wearing a white coat and carrying a set of x-rays. Jim decided he must be the long-awaited orthopedist. The man following him was about Jim’s size and build, and dressed in a nurse’s scrubs. What was surprising, though was that Jim recognized them instantly as a Sentinel and Guide. 

“Do you have a problem?” the Sentinel asked, glaring at him.

“No. No, I’ve never seen a Sentinel who was a doctor before.”

“Live and learn,” the small man growled, sticking the x-rays up on a light panel with sharp, aggressive movements. His Guide took up a position by the door, folding his arms across his chest and keeping a watchful eye on Jim. “Here,” the doctor said, jabbing a finger at the x-rays, “we have a displaced spiral fracture of the fourth middle phalanx. And here on the third medial phalanx, a comminuted fracture.”

Jim edged around to the other side of the bed, where he could get a bit of a look at the x-rays while still staying close to Sandburg. The doctor didn’t seem to care if he was paying any attention or not, but he figured he might as well see just how bad it was.

“And here, just for a little variety, on the first _proximal_ phalanx, another spiral fracture. That’s the right hand. That one got off lightly, didn’t it? Here on the left, we have a displaced spiral fracture of the proximal phalanx of the thumb, and then a comminuted fracture of the distal phalanx.” He went on like that for the rest of Sandburg’s left fingers, then spun away from the x-rays to stare Jim in the face. “You _cannot fucking do this_ ,” he said, his voice shaking with rage. “Do you understand? He’s your _Guide_ , for fuck’s sake.”

Before Jim could react, the doctor’s own Guide had covered the space between them and was folding the Sentinel into his arms. The little man was practically vibrating, and Jim had little doubt that without the Guide’s intervention, he’d have attacked Jim, obviously not caring that the other Sentinel was twice his size.

And Jim would have fought back, unable to control himself enough to explain the misunderstanding. Taking deep breaths, he found his way back around to the other side of the gurney, taking shelter behind his own Guide. And Sandburg—God, Sandburg was sitting up, and reaching for him with one of those mangled hands, trying to talk to him around his numb and swollen tongue. “It’s okay,” Jim said, settling the Guide’s hand back on the pillow. “Don’t, it’s okay.” He focused in on his Guide’s heartbeat, letting it calm him in place of the Guide’s hands and voice. Finally, when he was able to look at the other Sentinel without snarling, he said, “I didn’t do this to him.”

The doctor-Sentinel looked at him skeptically, clutching at his Guide’s arm with one hand. “Kas—Kas, could you--?”

“Sure.” The big Guide released him and went to Sandburg’s side. “May I?” he asked, holding his hand just over Sandburg’s forehead.

And he was clearly asking the other Guide, not Jim. Sandburg nodded. 

Both Sentinels watched as the bigger Guide laid his hand on the injured one’s forehead. Finally, the big Guide—Kas—looked back at his Sentinel and nodded. 

“Okay,” the doctor said. He nodded a couple of times, and Jim heard him take slow, deep breaths. “Okay. I’m sorry,” he added, not quite looking at Jim.

Jim nodded back. “It’s okay. You don’t know me, and I’m upset about it too.” _Upset_. That was what the G-TAC woman had said, and the word didn’t begin to cover it. “I mean, if I’d thought you did it, I’d have probably killed you by now.”

“You have Kas to thank that I didn’t.” The Sentinel’s heart rate was starting to slow to something approaching normal, but his Guide stayed close to him, offering silent support. “All right. Let’s start over. I’m Dr. Angel Temas. This is my Guide, Kas Temas.”

“Detective Jim Ellison. And this is, uh, Sandburg.” He realized for the first time that he didn’t know his Guide’s given name. “He’s had kind of a rough day.” 

Sandburg made that choking laughing sound again. 

“And he can’t talk right now because he just had stitches in his tongue,” Jim added. “You doing all right, Chief?”

Sandburg nodded. 

“Good. Well, he has three broken digits on his right hand—the first, middle, and third fingers—and five broken digits on his left. Some of the fractures are quite severe, and some of the bones are broken in more than one place—what we call a comminuted fracture. There’s also quite a bit of soft tissue damage—that’s damage to the cartilage and ligaments surrounding the joints.” 

Jim nodded. “Got that, Chief?” He seemed to be tracking all right, but Jim figured it didn’t hurt to ask.

The Guide nodded.

“So the question is whether we want to set the fractures and put casts on them—basically just immobilize them and let nature take over—operate to repair the soft-tissue damage and put in pins to further stabilize the fractures while they heal. That’s a decision you two will have to make, because there are advantages each way. Either way, he’s going to be without the use of his hands for a while. With casts, the recovery time will be shorter, because if we operate, we essentially have to do more damage in order to gain access to the injuries. Then there would also be post-surgical pain to deal with, which will make the next couple of weeks more difficult. But the surgical repairs would be much more precise, and we can be sure that everything will heal the right way, the first time. If we don’t operate now, there’s a good chance that we might have to do it later anyway, to restore full range of motion to his hands.”

“Okay,” Jim said. That was a lot to absorb. “What do you think, Chief?”

Sandburg said something completely incomprehensible; it sounded like, “Wa—ooh—uh?” Shaking his head, he stopped trying to talk.

“Yeah, maybe we ought to give it a couple minutes for the rest of the Novocain to wear off,” Jim agreed. He tried to think of what else Sandburg might want to know to make this decision. “What kind of time-frame are we talking about, with each option, before he can use his hands again?”

“With casts, six to eight weeks. With surgery, I’d say at least twelve weeks.”

“Okay, that’s a pretty big difference.” He didn’t think the Guide would like not being able to so much as feed and dress himself—and while at the moment Jim didn’t mind taking care of him, he knew it would get old fast. 

“If we do have to operate later, he’d recover from the surgery faster, but the total time would end up being more. On the other hand, if he needed surgery on both hands later, we could do them one at a time, so he’d at least have one functioning hand.”

That was good to know. “That sounds good. Do we have any idea what the odds are on whether he will eventually need surgery or not?”

“Hard to say. If you choose not to do it now, I’d suggest you assume that you’ll probably be doing it later. If it ends up not being necessary, consider yourselves lucky.”

Jim took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “It’s your call, Chief.” He wanted to go for casts—surgery would mean keeping his Guide here, probably for a matter of days, and he wanted to be home. And he thought that being without the use of his hands for twice as long would be hard on both of them. But this would affect Sandburg more than him, so it had to be his decision.

“Casts,” Sandburg finally said. Actually, it sounded more like, “Cash,” but Jim was pretty sure he meant casts.

“You sure? You have any questions you want to ask first?”

Sandburg shook his head. “No. I wanna go home.”

“Perfectly understandable,” Temas said. “I think I’d feel the same way. We can also reassess things as you’re healing—if anything is going wrong, or if you feel more ready for surgery in a couple of weeks, we can still operate then.”

“Great,” Sandburg said (or, “Gragh,”), nodding. 

“Setting the fractures is going to hurt—probably almost as much as getting them. I assume you’d prefer to be unconscious while we do it?”

“YES.” 

“Good choice.” Temas did not, Jim noticed, ask his opinion about it. Picking up Sandburg’s chart, he wrote something on it, saying, “Kas, why don’t you--?”

“Sure.” Kas took the chart and headed for the door. Pausing, he asked, “You sure you’re okay now?”

“Yeah. I’m fine,” Temas said brightly. 

“Okay.” 

Jim hoped he was right, and that Temas wasn’t going to lose it while his Guide was out of the room. He watched Temas for a few tense moments after the Guide left, but everything seemed to be all right. 

“How _did_ this happen?” Temas asked suddenly. “I mean, if you don’t mind my asking. In the line of duty?”

“G-TAC,” Jim said tersely. He supposed Temas had a right to know, but he wasn’t eager to talk about it, and besides, he still didn’t know the details himself.

“G-TAC?” Temas sounded disbelieving. “They did this? To a Guide?”

“Uh-huh.” 

“Why?”

“Training.” 

“Some kind of Special Forces thing?” Temas guessed, with an anxious glance at the door where his own Guide had left.

“No. Just for the hell of it, I guess.”

“You don’t _know_?”

“I just met him about four hours ago,” Jim explained. It seemed like a lot longer, but a glance at his watched confirmed that it was barely two in the afternoon, and his G-TAC appointment had been at ten. “Did _everybody_ here think I did this?” he asked suddenly, as a more sinister explanation for the doctors’ and nurse’s strange behavior occurred to him. 

“Yep,” Temas said.

No wonder they’d asked his permission to take the most basic comfort measures. If he had done this, there was no reason to expect that he’d care if his Guide was comfortable or not. They might have thought he’d prefer it if they left his Guide in as much pain as he’d gone to the trouble to inflict. “And you’re the only one that _said_ anything about it?”

“Uh-huh.” 

“Jesus.”

“If he was your wife or child, they’d have called the police,” Temas explained, “but since he’s your Guide, there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Except try to knock some sense into your head, which only another Sentinel would dare try.” 

Jim looked at him skeptically.

“And yes, I know you could break me in half with one hand, but Kas wouldn’t have let that happen. He was special forces,” Temas added, with a hint of pride. “Army Rangers.”

“Really? So was I.” It was hard to imagine a Guide in the Rangers. There had been Guides attached to the units he’d served with, but they hadn’t actually been Rangers.

“He wasn’t there for too long—he served for a couple of years, then they sent him to Ranger School—which I imagine you have the same horror stories about that he does—and then not long after they pulled him out to hold my hand through boot camp. They promised him he could go back to the Rangers once I was done, but then we Bonded, so.” Temas shrugged.

“I didn’t have a Guide in boot, or in Ranger school.” 

“I know. No one does. I was too emotionally fragile to handle it, so it was either give me a six-foot-four security blanket or kick me out. And, Sentinel, so.” He shrugged again. “I got Kas.” 

Just then, Kas himself came back in, carrying an armload of supplies. As Temas helped him unload them onto the counter, he explained, “I was just telling Ellison and Sandburg how we met.”

“Oh. Yeah, that was hilarious. Having to go through boot camp, for a second time, after Ranger School? Pfft. And with that one carrying on like he was in Hell on Earth. Did you tell him about the wall?”

“No, I did not, and I’m not going to.”

“I wanna hear about the wall,” Sandburg said. 

Temas immediately relented. “There’s a wall that you have to climb over, on the obstacle course. I could never get over it. First they said I could use the Female Aid box—they let the women use this step, because they’re shorter, and I’m short? Well, it still wasn’t enough. But you had to be able to do it to pass out of boot, so eventually they agreed to count it if Kas basically threw me over the damn thing.” As he told the story, he prepared a syringe and injected it into Sandburg’s IV line. “Count back from ten, for me.”

“’en, ‘ine, ei’gh, s….”

“And he’s out,” Temas said. “Let’s start over here. Ellison, you want to go around to the other side? Listen to his breathing and heartbeat, and let me know if anything changes.” Taking occasional glances at the x-rays across the room, he began carefully putting Sandburg’s fingers back into shape. “Can you give me that—yeah, thanks,” he said, as Kas handed him a small splint. “Ellison was in the Rangers too.”

“Yeah?” Kas glanced at him briefly, then stopped and took a second, closer look. “Hey, you’re him.”

“I am? Who?”

“When did you go through Ranger School?”

“’80.”

“Class 5-80?”

Jim hesitated. “I finished with 6-80.”

“You _are_ the guy. I’m surprised I didn’t recognize you.”

Jim was starting to have an idea of what Kas was talking about. “I didn’t realize I was famous for it.”

“No, I was _there_. We started out in the same squad—they did it that way on purpose, because they figured a Guide wouldn’t make it without a Sentinel to look out for me. But then you wigged the fuck out in the second week. They recycled you?”

“I had to do a day-one restart, but yeah.” 

“Makes sense, since you didn’t get very far.”

“I don’t even really remember my first try,” Jim agreed. “That’s why I didn’t recognize you, either. I remember there was a Guide there—they think that was why I freaked out, because it was pretty intense, and…”

“Right, the Blessed Protector instinct. That would explain it. It was probably a good thing it happened then—I don’t see how you’d have lived through the Walk and Run phases.”

“I lived through them just fine,” Jim pointed out.

“With a Guide there, I mean.”

“Don’t feel bad,” Temas put in. “I can’t even stand _hearing_ about the Walk and Run phases.”

“If I had to pick between doing Ranger School again and getting you through med school again, I’d pick Ranger School,” Kas told him. “In a heartbeat.”

“If I had to do either one again, I’d kill myself,” Temas answered. “Okay, I’m ready for the plaster here.”

Kas handed him the plaster and continued, “It worked out okay for me—if I’d gone through with a Sentinel, no one would ever have believed I was good enough to make it on my own.”  
Jim tried not to let his expression show that he was having a hard time believing it, too.   
It must not have worked, because Kas said, “I know. Guides, we’re all pussies, right?”  
Jim glanced down at Sandburg, remembering how earlier that morning, he’d listened to the Guide take a brutal beating, and ask, _Is that the best you can do_? “Mine sure isn’t.”

“Or mine,” Temas said.

Kas broke the solemn moment by saying, “My Sentinel, though, _he’s_ a pussy.” 

Jim wondered how Temas was going to react to that—in his experience, Guides were expected to show their Sentinels a certain level of respect, no matter how close they were—but to his surprise, the other Sentinel just laughed. “If I was less of a pussy, we wouldn’t have met.”

“There is that,” Kas allowed.

“Okay, let’s switch sides,” Temas said to Jim. “Don’t touch the cast until it’s had time to set.”

Jim went back around to Sandburg’s right side. The new cast covered all four fingers, including the uninjured pinky, but left his thumb out. 

“Yeah,” Temas said, seeing where Jim was looking. “He’ll be able to use that hand a little bit—not much, but if he wears sweats or something like that, he’ll be able to get his pants down on his own, which I thought would be nice for you both. On this side I’m going to have to cast the thumb, too, but I’m going to do it like this,” he explained, holding up his own hand with the fingers together and the thumb out at a 90 degree angle to them. “He’ll have sort of a claw, like a panda’s thumb. I’m not sure if it’ll be useful for anything, but it might be.”

“Sounds good.”

Temas worked in silence for a few minutes. “Kas?” he said in a small voice.

“Yeah?”

“Ellison says they did this at G-TAC.”

“Huh.” Kas sounded noticeably less surprised than Temas had. 

“Have you…I mean, have you heard of anything like that?”

Kas hesitated. “Nothing this bad,” he said gently, laying one hand on his Sentinel’s shoulder. “But I have heard of…yeah.”

Temas concentrated on Sandburg’s hand for a moment; Jim could hear his heart rate speed up. “Were…?”

“No. No, not me,” Kas said immediately. “You know I volunteered. But some of the guys who were drafted, they—you know. Most of the draftees, they decide to make the best of it, but a few….”

Temas shook his head. “One of the reasons I was scared out of my fucking mind, in boot,” he said. “I heard stories, you know? And even though I volunteered, I couldn’t do what they were telling me to do, and I kept falling farther and farther behind. I wasn’t sure if they’d understand I was really trying, or if they’d care. But that’s—I mean, that’s Sentinels. I didn’t know they did it to Guides, too. _Guides_?”

“I kind of made sure you didn’t know, Ang,” Kas said softly. 

Temas paused in his work long enough to reach up and squeeze the hand that rested on his shoulder. “I guess that explains why G-TAC doesn’t care about Sentinels who hurt their Guides.”

“Yeah,” Kas agreed.

Jim was embarrassed to witness such an obviously private moment—although the little Sentinel, for his part, didn’t seem to mind. But at the same time, he was surprised by the easy intimacy the two men shared. 

Sentinels were both rare and usually territorial, so he hadn’t had the opportunity to meet many others, much less get to know them well. Usually he had been the only one assigned to his military unit, and he was the only one in Major Crimes. When a Guide was assigned to work with him, Jim strove to treat the Guide like any other colleague—friendly, but with a little distance. The Guides generally rejected the friendliness and embraced the distance, treating him with an almost uncomfortable level of respect. And for the same reasons, he’d had few opportunities to observe Bonded pairs. From most of those meetings, he had no impression of the Guide at all apart from as a shadow hovering just behind the Sentinel’s shoulder. One he remembered as being fawningly obsequious with her Sentinel—never speaking unless spoken to, and usually then only to agree with her Sentinel’s opinions. Another had treated his treated his Sentinel with affection, but tempered by an obvious caution, something that had reminded Jim at the time of a trainer working with a lion or tiger—the Guide may have liked or even loved his Sentinel, but he never forgot that she was a wild animal.

It was those encounters, along with his distaste for G-TAC, that made Jim reject the idea of Bonding. He had never seen a Bonded Sentinel and Guide who seemed to have a relationship that looked like anything he wanted. If he had met Temas and Kas earlier, maybe he would have formed a different impression of what Bonding was all about. 

On the other hand, maybe the impression he _had_ formed was the accurate one. It was certainly unusual for a Guide to be an Army Ranger or for a Sentinel to be a medical doctor, so there it was more than possible that the nature of their Bond was just one more way that Kas and Temas were out of the ordinary.

After a while Temas glanced up at Jim. Jim had the impression that his focus had narrowed to his patient and his Guide, and he was just now remembering that Jim was even in the room. “Well, at least he’s got you now.”

Jim nodded. “He does.”

“And you aren’t going to give him back.”

“No.”

“If I were you, I’d Bond with him right away, just to make sure.”

Jim had to admit the idea had some appeal. The primal Sentinel in him had wanted nothing else from the moment he’d first touched Sandburg, but so far, his reason had won out. He had never wanted to spend the rest of his life tied to someone who had no choice but to treat him with reverence and fear. And hell, he didn’t even know if he _liked_ Sandburg, apart from their obvious compatibility as Guide and Sentinel. But Temas had a point—there was one logical reason in favor of the Bond, and that was that it would protect Sandburg. 

On the other hand, it wasn’t his decision, or only his decision. “He said he doesn’t want to.”

“You managed to discuss that already, in the four hours you’ve known him?” Temas asked.

“It wasn’t an in-depth discussion.” But that Sandburg had mentioned it at all—at a point when he had no reason to believe it wouldn’t make Jim decide not to rescue him after all—suggested it was pretty important to him.

“Well, it might look different to him in the morning.” Temas evidently had Sandburg’s bones where he wanted them; he began applying the splints and plaster. 

Jim nodded. It was possible, certainly.

“Finished,” Temas said a moment later. “We can bring him out of the anesthesia now.” Kes handed him a syringe, and he injected it into the IV line. 

It took Sandburg a several long moments to wake. First he began to twitch, just slightly, and murmur something. He didn’t seem agitated, but Jim stayed close anyway, just in case, ready to offer reassurance. Next, as the Guide’s breathing and heart rate increased in a way that suggested wakefulness, he went completely still. Then he opened one eye and said, “Jim?”

“Yeah, it’s me. I’m here.”

“Good.” He closed his eye for another moment, breathing calmly, then opened both eyes and raised his free hand to squint at the cast. “’his feels a lo’ be’ur,” he said. “’anks.”

“No problem,” Temas said. “I’d like you to rest for another fifteen or twenty minutes, just so we can be sure that the anesthetic has cleared your system, and then we can see about getting you out of here.” 

“Okay.” Sandburg bit his lip. “Jim?”

“Yeah, Chief?”

“You’re ‘aking me home, righ’?”

“Yes.”

“All righ’.” 

Temas moved to the foot of the gurney and picked up Sandburg’s chart. Flipping through it, he said, “It looks like all we really have to do is take out the catheter—I can do that, unless you’d rather have the nurse.”

“You can,” the Guide said. “Jim? Okay?”

“Okay,” Jim agreed. 

Temas handed off the chart to Kas and did that. 

While he worked, Kas said, “He’s going to need a lot of follow-up care, both for the hands and generally. Do you have a regular health-care provider that you want to use?”

Sandburg glanced over at Jim. “ _I_ don’.”

“I just go to the practice the department uses for my annual physicals,” Jim said, shrugging. “And the ER here for on the job injuries.”

“Okay. Then normally the hospital would assign someone from general medicine to oversee the follow-up care,” Kas explained, giving Temas a significant look.

“Normally, huh?” Temas said, grinning as he re-covered Sandburg with the blankets and threw away the used catheter. “I think what Kas is suggesting is that we should just put me down as the attending physician—I’ll be doing the follow-up for his hands, anyway, and it doesn’t look like anything else is going to come up that I can’t handle—and if I can’t, the GP would be calling in another specialist anyway, which I can do. Might be easier not to have to deal with a new person.”

That sounded good to Jim. Even though Temas had introduced himself to Jim by berating him for abusing his Guide, that he obviously cared almost as much about Sandburg’s welfare as Jim did more than made up for the initial hostility. “Chief?”

“Sounds good,” Sandburg agreed. 

Kas noted something on the chart, and held it out for Temas to initial. “Okay,” Temas said. “One more thing before I get started on drawing up the discharge instructions. These wounds on your feet—mind if I look at them?”

“Go ahead,” the Guide answered.

Temas folded the blankets up from the bottom of the gurney to have a look. He winced, then nodded. “That has to hurt. I’ll be prescribing some salve that you can put on them—actually, three salves, one for the burns, one for other broken skin, and one for unbroken skin. I’d like to leave most of the wounds open to the air; they’ll heal faster that way. But the feet, if you’re going to be walking on them, will need to be bandaged.”

“I’ll carry him,” Jim said immediately, hating the idea of his Guide walking on those blistered feet. “Uh, if that’s okay, Chief.”

“Okay,” Sandburg said. 

“That’s what I’d do,” Temas agreed. 

“Really,” Kas said. “How, exactly?” he asked, looking his Sentinel up and down.

Temas looked up at his Guide. “A wheelbarrow? Let me rephrase. If _I were Jim_ , that’s what I’d do. For the next few days, bandage them if you have to put on shoes and leave the house, but avoid that if you can. Around the house, just wear clean socks if you’re going to walk at all.”

“Okay,” Jim agreed. That would be easy enough. He hoped they’d be keeping Sandburg pretty doped up on pain medication for the next few days anyway, so he’d only have to get from the bathroom and back, and maybe from the bed to the couch for an occasional change of scenery. 

“I’m gonna need some socks,” Sandburg pointed out. “And clothes,” he added, looking at Jim as if to ask if he had a problem with that.

He didn’t of course. “I can hardly carry you out of here naked, can I? Shit.”

“Gift shop,” Kas said. “Overpriced as hell, but you should be able to get the basics until you can get to another store.”

“Right.” Jim looked toward the door to the room. “Maybe you could stay with him, until—I mean, it’ll just take a minute.” He knew, objectively, that nothing would happen to Sandburg in a few minutes. 

But the last time he’d left his Guide alone for a few minutes, all of his fingers had been broken.

“Sure,” Temas agreed. 

Jim looked down at his Guide. “Okay then.”

“Okay,” Sandburg said calmly, but Jim heard his heart rate speed up. He was no more comfortable with the idea than Jim was, Jim thought. 

After he hadn’t moved for several moments, Kas said, in a tone that suggested vast experience with catering to the whims of Sentinels, “Or I could just go for you.”

Jim immediately handed over his wallet. It had all of his credit cards, his driver’s license, and quite a bit of cash in it, but he’d rather trust a near-stranger with that than trust his Guide with—well, with anyone, at that point. 

“Be right back.”

While he was gone, Temas took out some business cards and wrote a phone number on the back of them, then handed one each to Jim and Sandburg—who held his between his thumb and his right-hand cast. “If there’s anything we can do for you—me or Kas—call anytime. That’s our home number on the back. If we’re not here, we’re usually there. If we don’t answer, leave a message at both numbers and we’ll get back to you within a couple of hours. Actually.” He took the cards back and added another number to each one. “My pager number. It’s supposed to only be for hospital business, so don’t use it unless it’s a real emergency.”

Jim had never had a doctor go to so much trouble to make sure Jim could reach him before—usually it was just, “call the office, whoever is on call will help you.” But at the same time, there was something strangely familiar about Temas’s behavior. 

It took him just a few moments to place it. He did the same thing himself sometimes, with victims and witnesses. Not all of them, but the ones that he for some reason felt unusually protective of. He’d wondered if that almost instinctive need to protect was a Sentinel thing, but this was the first time he’d been on the receiving end of another Sentinel’s protection. It was—a little weird. Not necessarily bad, but weird. 

“Any time,” Temas emphasized, handing the cards back. “I mean, don’t call in the middle of the night if it can reasonably wait until morning, but don’t be afraid to call at any reasonable hour if it’s something little. Or an unreasonable one if it’s something big. Either of you. And Kas, I’m sure he won’t mind if you want to talk about--” He gestured vaguely. “Guide stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?” Kas asked, sounding amused, as he came back into the room with a large bag marked with the hospital logo. “Yeah, do. If the big guy there gives you any trouble,” he added to Sandburg, with a glance at Jim, “let me know.”

Jim wasn’t sure whether to be offended or not. He was glad Temas hadn’t said it—from another Sentinel, it would sound like a challenge to his rights over his Guide. Not that he had—or wanted to have—the right to give Sandburg “any trouble.” But Temas was a Sentinel, and explicitly offering to come between another Sentinel and his Guide was just not done. But Kas was a Guide—Sandburg’s colleague. Guides banding together against a Sentinel was definitely not done, either, but it didn’t seem wrong in the same way. 

Sandburg himself gave Kas a slight nod before fixing his eyes warily on Jim’s face. Conscious of the fact that Sandburg was watching closely, Jim made himself take a deep breath and respond lightly, “Yeah, if I get out of line, have him knock me into shape.” Sandburg needed all the protectors he could get, even if Jim was determined never to give him a reason to feel that he needed to be protected from Jim. 

Temas met Jim’s eye and nodded, like Jim had just passed some important test. “I’ll write up those discharge instruction while you take care of getting him dressed. The nurse will help you set up an appointment with me for next week.”

“Thanks—for everything,” Jim said. Temas had taken excellent care of Sandburg, and since meeting both him and Kas, he felt better about the idea of having a Guide than he ever had before. “Maybe, uh, maybe sometime we could get together outside work.” Oh, Christ, now it sounded like he was asking Temas out on a date. “The four of us, I mean. Once Sandburg’s feeling up to it.”

Temas glanced at Kas, who nodded, before saying, “That sounds good. We’d like that.”

As they left, Jim heard Kas saying, “You realize we just made plans to _do something with another couple_.”

“I know, we’re married,” Temas answered. “You’re the wife. I call husband.”

“Angelito, you are totally the wife.”

Temas coughed, “ _Ahem-male nurse_.”

“Doesn’t matter. You’re still the wife.”

Jim realized he was eavesdropping, and that Sandburg was watching him do it with a look of amusement, and made himself stop listening. “Those guys are really something,” he said.

“I like ‘em,” Sandburg said, with just a hint of defiance. 

“So do I,” Jim assured him. “They’re just…different.” Picking up the bag, he said, “Let’s see what Kas picked out for you.”

The bag turned out to contain a three-pack of briefs, three pairs of socks, and a set of sweats. Jim wished there was a way to wash them before putting them on his Guide—they reeked of chemicals, plastic, and the other people who had handed them in the store. But there was no help for it, so he filtered out those scents and began getting Sandburg dressed. 

It ended up being an arduous process, and not without some pain for the Guide. Now that they didn’t have to worry about every movement jarring Sandburg’s hands, he seemed to take more notice of his other injuries. He winced and hissed with pain as he maneuvered his legs into the underwear and sweatpants that Jim held out for him, and when Jim pulled the shirt over his badly abraded back, tears sprang to his eyes. “Sorry,” Jim said. “Sorry, I know it hurts.”

Sandburg shook his head. “No’ your faul’.” 

Sitting on the edge of the gurney, fully dressed, he looked less wounded and waiflike than he had naked and battered. Jim remembered the vivid impression of bravery and strength that he’d formed when he first heard his Guide’s voice. The next few weeks were going to be difficult, but they’d get through them, together. 

#

“It’s a damn good thing it’s working today,” Jim said, leaning against the wall of the elevator as it slowly rose. “My place—our place—is on the third floor, and this damn thing breaks down all the time.”

_Our place_. Blair had lived with three other Sentinels, but all of them had made it absolutely clear that the house or apartment, and everything in it, belonged to them, not him. One of them had routinely backhanded him if he slipped and called the place, “home” instead of “your house.” 

Jim’s behavior was different in every way from the other Sentinels he’d been assigned to. Blair wasn’t sure he could trust it—he doubted that Jim was actively trying to trick him into complacency, but he was sure that at the moment the Sentinel was overwhelmed by his instinct to protect his Guide. Once that eased off some, he might revert to the behavior mandated by his cultural conditioning. 

On the other hand, a few of the things he’d done weren’t consistent at all with a Sentinel acting on instinct. Jim’s cultural context would tell him that making decisions—all decisions—on behalf of his Guide was his right. In any cultural context, the Blessed Protector instinct would tell him that deciding on the best treatment for his injured Guide was not just his right, but his duty. But Jim seemed to understand that having just been—his mind shied away from the word, but he made himself think it— _tortured_ , it would be important for him to have some feeling of control over what happened to his body. And he’d overcome both instinct and cultural conditioning to ask for Blair’s consent for the medical procedures that had been carried out on him. 

He really didn’t know what to make of that. 

But the elevator was stopping, so he put his thoughts aside. There were two entry doors on the third floor, and another that looked like it led to a staircase. Jim went to the second door. “Can you get your arm around my neck, Chief? Just hold on while I get my keys out.”

Stretching his arm pulled at the torn skin on his shoulders, but it hurt a lot less than it would have to be put down and picked up again—or to stand and walk from the car, which Blair had pretty much expected Jim to make him do, regardless of what he’d said to the other Sentinel in the hospital. He managed it, and Jim got the door open. “Home sweet home,” Jim said as he carried him inside, kicking the door shut behind him. “Couch okay with you?”

“Yeah.” He hoped his tone concealed his surprise at being asked. If Jim somehow didn’t know that his opinions about things weren’t supposed to matter, Blair didn’t want to be the one to clue him in.

The apartment was large and spacious, with an open plan and lots of windows along the exterior walls. The living room area was defined by an area rug, television, and two couches. Jim put him gently on one of these. “My room’s up there,” Jim explained, pointing up at a loft that overlooked the living room. “Kitchen’s over there, and the bathroom is back behind it. There’s a spare room next to the kitchen that should do for you—there’s a bunch of crap I’ll have to clear out, but there’s a bed in there.”

“Okay.” Blair wondered if he was supposed to go there now. Well, if that was what Jim wanted, he’d have to say so. In two of his previous placements, the Sentinel had expected him to stay in his own room, being as quiet and unobtrusive as humanly possible, when not explicitly told otherwise. In the other placement, the Sentinel’s control had been so weak that she needed to have him in the same room, even at home. She had placed a mat in the corner of each room, and he’d been expected to sit on it, not moving or making a sound. If she left the room, she’d either signal him to stay where he was—if she was just leaving for a moment, to go to the bathroom or get a drink or something—or signal him to follow, which he was supposed to do silently, keeping just a few steps behind her. If he wanted to get a drink or go to the bathroom, tough shit, he’d wait until she told him to. 

That kind of treatment was unusually strict, even for this country—at home, most Guides and Sentinels acted more or less like any other people sharing a home, with the exception that all of the compromises necessary to peaceful cohabitation were expected to be made on one side—the Guide’s. In Blair’s case, G-TAC had probably advised his Sentinels that giving him any trace of personal freedom would give him ideas, or something. As if he didn’t have ideas already. Jim appeared not to have been given that advice—or else had considered the source and completely ignored it—so maybe he was going to treat Blair a bit more normally. 

Now Jim sat next to him, going through the papers the hospital had given him. “Says here that for the next few days I’m supposed to give you a small meal every four hours or so, until you get used to eating regularly again. Feeling hungry?”

“I could eat,” Blair admitted. He wasn’t sure when he had been fed last—it had been at least a day. 

“Something simple to start,” Jim read. “Egg and toast.”

“He wrote that?” Blair craned his neck to look at the papers, his curiosity leading him to momentarily forget that he probably shouldn’t do that.

“Yeah—he wrote a book, here, practically. If the guy wasn’t Bonded, I’d be worried.” Jim didn’t sound particularly worried, though—for some reason, Temas wasn’t setting off his territorial imperative. Or maybe he just didn’t feel territorial about Blair, yet. “Here, have a look at these while I make your lunch,” he said, tucking the discharge papers between the cast and thumb of Blair’s right hand. “Does that egg sound all right?”

“Hm?” Blair vividly remembered the last time he’d been asked his preferences about what he wanted to eat—it had been on the plane back into the US, when the flight attendant had asked if he wanted the lasagna or the chicken. Since then it had been made vividly clear that he’d eat what was given to him and be grateful for it. “Yeah, that sounds fine.”

“Okay.” Jim stood. “Sunny-side-up?”

Blair liked sunny-side-up eggs just fine, but some impulse made him say, “Scrambled?” just to see how far Jim could be pushed.

He would not have been the least bit surprised if Jim had hit him, or told him that if he was going to be picky, he could just go hungry a little longer. At best, he figured, Jim would give him the egg sunny-side-up just to remind him who was in charge here. But Jim just said, “You want a little cheese in that, Chief?”

For a moment Blair literally did not understand the question. He was expecting a reprimand of some kind, but he couldn’t figure out any way that what Jim had actually said could be one. 

By the time he figured it out, Jim was looking down at him with an expression of concern. “You okay, Chief?”

He picked his jaw up off the floor. “Yeah. Uh, cheese sounds good, thanks.” 

#

Jim shook his head to himself as he set a knob of butter melting in a saucepan and cracked an egg into a bowl. _Scrambled_? 

The kid had been _terrified_ —he’d sounded calm enough, just a little bit tentative, but his heart rate didn’t lie; he’d been scared out of his fucking mind to so much as express a preference about how he wanted his egg cooked. And then he’d _done it anyway_. 

Not because he trusted Jim. They hadn’t known each other long enough to establish trust, except maybe at the most basic, instinctive level—and his Guide’s instinct to trust a Sentinel had obviously been betrayed before this. No, he had every reason to expect Jim to pound him into the wall, but he had refused to give in to his fear, even to do something as simple as let Jim cook an egg for him in a way he didn’t like.

No wonder G-TAC had beaten the shit out of him. If they had wanted to terrorize him into submission—and Jim was sure that was what they had wanted to do—the best they could do hadn’t even come close. 

Jim had rejected the idea of Bonding because—among other reasons—if he was going to share the rest of his life with someone, he wanted an equal, not a submissive shadow. In his few romantic relationships, he’d chosen strong and capable women. Now, somehow, he had wound up with a Guide who had, at least, the potential to be a true partner to him. Was Sandburg that unique? 

No, he decided—there was Kas, too, and it couldn’t be that he’d happened to meet the only two strong and capable Guides in existence on the same day. Sandburg might be unusual in his fierce determination to hang on to his independence, but not in that he had it in the first place. 

The egg and toast were just about finished now. Putting his thoughts aside, Jim turned the egg out of the pan onto a plate, and poured a glass of orange juice while he was waiting for the toast to pop. When it had, he smeared on a little butter and carried the food out to the living room. 

Sandburg had the discharge papers on the coffee table in two piles, and was flipping one page over from the first pile to the second when Jim returned. He jumped and looked up at Jim with an almost guilty expression, like he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t have. “Are you supposed to take any of the meds now?” Jim asked.

“Um…not sure.” He flipped back a couple of pages. “The antibiotics are three times a day with food.”

“Okay.” Putting the plate and glass on the coffee table, Jim found that bottle and opened it. Checking the label, he shook out two pills. “Anything else?”

“Um…maybe one of the pain pills?”

Temas had prescribed three different kinds of pain pills—Vicodin, Tylenol with codeine, and a prescription-strength ibuprofen. “Which one?”

“Um…he made a chart.” Sandburg tried to pick up one of the pages. 

“This one?” Jim asked, taking it. 

“Yeah.”

The chart suggested Vicodin with every meal for the two or three days, then Vicodin and night and Tylenol with codeine during the day for several more days, then codeine and night and ibuprofen during the day, with codeine added as needed, for as long as it took. “This one,” Jim said, finding the Vicodin. He was going to need one of those pill boxes with all of the different compartments, like old people used, to keep track of everything. “You want ‘em all at once or one at a time?” he asked, holding the three pills out in his palm.

“All at once is okay.”

Jim popped them into Sandburg’s mouth and held the glass for him to drink. After he’d swallowed, the Guide said, “You’re not really supposed to take antibiotics with citrus.”

Jim looked down at the glass. “You could have said something earlier.”

“Sorry.” 

He drank the rest of the juice on his way back to the kitchen—no sense wasting it—and filled another glass with water. When he got back to the living room, Sandburg was trying to pick up the fork with his thumb and cast. “I don’t think that’s going to work, Chief,” he said, taking the fork out of Sandburg’s awkward grip. Jim could understand why he’d wanted to try—hand-feeding another grown man was going to be awkward as hell for both of them. “And I’d rather not get eggs all over the couch, so just let me do it, all right?”

“Um. Okay.”

Picking up a forkful of eggs, Jim contemplated whether to say something about a train going into the tunnel. No, he decided. In Sandburg’s place, he wouldn’t find that at all funny. Better to just be completely matter-of-fact about it, as if there was nothing at all to be embarrassed about. 

The first couple of bites, Jim tried to put directly into Sandburg’s mouth, like he’d seen people do when feeding a baby. Those attempts either had him ramming the loaded fork into the Guide’s closed lips, or had the Guide sitting there with his mouth open for in advance of when it was necessary. After that, though, Jim figured out that if he just held the fork an inch or two from Sandburg’s mouth, Sandburg could cover the rest of the distance on his own, when he was ready for it. The same strategy worked with the toast, and by the time they were finished, the process did seem fairly normal and not particularly embarrassing.

“It’s weird,” Sandburg said, around his last bite of toast. “One of my jobs, I was a personal attendant to this quadriplegic guy. I had to, um, feed him and stuff? And people were always like, oh my god, that must be so weird. But it was really only weird for the first day.”

“Yeah.” _One_ of his jobs? Sandburg didn’t look much older than draft age, eighteen or nineteen. Jim wondered when he’d had the chance to have a job.

“Yeah. It was a really good job, because he had someone else to take him to class and everything during the day, so it didn’t get in the way of my classes. I just had to get him up in the morning, then feed him his dinner, then put him to bed at night. So it was like maybe three hours of work a day, and then I got to live in this two-bedroom apartment he had for free. Like a block from campus, it was great. Except this one time he had an 8 AM class; that kind of sucked. But it was still way better than working in the dining hall or something. They had to pay pretty good because, you know, you have to help him in the bathroom, and that’s gross. But it was like ten minutes out of my day, and how is it really less gross to slop food onto people’s trays in a dining hall for four hours, instead of ten minutes dealing with the other end? Funny how--” Sandburg shut his mouth suddenly. “Sorry, I’m—I talk too much. I’ll just shut up now.” He tucked his chin in against his chest, looking warily at Jim out of the corner of his eye.

Poor kid probably hadn’t had anybody to talk to for quite a while. “It’s okay. You—I guess you went to college?” Jim gathered that from the mention of classes and semesters. He supposed that if Sandburg’s draft number had been high, he would have had time for a year, maybe even a year and a half of college. Or maybe he hadn’t been drafted at all, and had gone to college on a G-TAC scholarship—except then he wouldn’t have needed an outside job.

“Yes.”

The one-word answer was a little disappointing. He didn’t want to interrogate his new Guide about his life before G-TAC, but he was curious. Finally he asked, “What were you studying?”, figuring that wasn’t a particularly intrusive question.

“An’ropo’ogy.”

That answered one question—Sandburg’s speech was definitely not getting any clearer; Jim was just getting better at understanding it. “Sorry?”

Sandburg tried again. “An-tro-pology.”

“Anthropology?”

“Yes.”

“That’s interesting.” It definitely must have been before G-TAC—on a G-TAC scholarship, he’d have been required to study something that would make him useful to his Sentinel—criminal justice, or political science, maybe foreign languages. Jim had only the haziest idea of what anthropology was, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t a field that would be considered relevant for a working Guide—if it were, he’d have a clearer idea of what it was. 

“Yes.”

Maybe if he kept asking questions, Sandburg would get that he was really interested, and offer him more than one-word answers. “Were you any good at it?”

Sandburg looked like he was considering refusing to answer. Finally he said flatly, “Yes. I was.” Letting his head drop back against the couch cushions, he closed his eyes.

It was probably as close as he dared to come to telling Jim to piss off. Clearly he’d put his foot in his mouth somehow. “You probably want to rest,” he said diplomatically. “Lie down here on the couch if you want to; I need to get your room fixed up.”

“Thanks.” The Guide curled up on the sofa, his head on one of the throw pillow. Jim got a patterned throw from the back of the other couch and spread it out over him, then left him alone.

Going into the spare room, Jim noticed for the first time how unsuitable as a bedroom it was. For one thing, it offered absolutely no privacy. It had window that looked out into—for some reason—the living room, and it opened directly out onto the kitchen, with no door or partition at all. The doorway was an odd size, too, so hanging a door wouldn’t be easy. The bed was all right, he supposed—it was an old double that Jim had moved down here after the end of his last serious relationship, when he hadn’t wanted to sleep on a mattress that smelled like his former girlfriend. He’d replaced it upstairs with a king, but the double bed should be fine for the small Guide. The bed, though, was the only thing in the room that ought to stay—there was no dresser, no desk, no nightstand, not even a lamp. 

And the rest of the room was half-full of junk—fishing and camping gear, his golf clubs, his Army footlocker, a few boxes of childhood things. A few more boxes of things he had never bothered to unpack when he last moved. It wasn’t the least bit inviting—he really ought to make a start on carrying all that stuff down to his storage unit in the basement, but he didn’t welcome the idea of leaving his Guide alone, even while he was still in the same building.

Maybe tomorrow he’d feel up to it. For now, he set about doing as much as he could without leaving the apartment. First he arranged the boxes and other junk into a fairly neat pile against the wall, freeing as much floor space as he could. The footlocker, he decided, would do for a temporary nightstand, and he could get one of the lamps from his own bedroom. 

The double-bed sheets and blankets were in one of the boxes, so that part at least was easy. They did smell slightly musty; Jim debated whether anyone but a Sentinel would be able to detect the smell, then decided to wash them, just to be safe. He didn’t have to leave the apartment to do it—the washer and dryer were in the bathroom—so there was no reason not to. He could throw the rest of the underwear and socks Kas had bought at the hospital in there, too.

After putting the laundry in the wash, Jim went up to his room to get that lamp. On the way, though, he noticed that the message light on his phone was blinking. Picking it up, he dialed his voicemail.

“Ellison,” his Captain’s voice said. “Banks here. We were expecting you back at work two hours ago. Please give me a call when you get this.” 

Shit. Somehow, he’d forgotten all about work. He’d left for his appointment at G-TAC saying he’d be back by eleven. A glance at his watch showed that he was now over six hours late. 

The next message was Captain Banks again. “Ellison, it’s Banks. Where are you? I’ve had dispatch trying to raise you on the radio for hours. Report in as soon as you can.”

Third message: “Jim, it’s Simon. I hope everything’s all right. I called G-TAC, and they say you left when you were supposed to, at about eleven. If you don’t let me know what’s going on, I’m going to notify the patrol units to start looking for you.”

That last message was only about an hour old—maybe Simon hadn’t had a chance to carry out his threat yet. Jim took the cordless handset upstairs and phoned in. 

“Simon, it’s Ellison.”

“Jim, you’ve been AWOL for six hours. You’d better be bleeding, son.”

“I’m not,” he admitted. “But I did spend the whole day at the ER.”

“What for?”

Jim was going to have to tell him sooner or later. Sooner, actually, because he had leave coming to him, and he planned to use it. “I found a Guide.”

“ _Found_ one?”

Realizing Simon was picturing him tripping over one on the sidewalk or something, Jim explained, “At G-TAC. He’s…injured. They were—I can’t talk about it.” He really couldn’t—the Guide was sleeping now, and Jim’s rage would wake him up if he tried to explain. “They hurt him. I had to take him to the ER, and he’s in pretty bad shape. I’m going to have to stay with him for at least the rest of the week.”

“The whole week? Jim, you have a full caseload on your desk, and you know we’re shorthanded.”

“I can’t help it, Simon—and it might end up being more than a week. You know I’m entitled to sick leave if my Guide can’t work.”

“You’ve been working without a Guide for years,” Simon protested. “Even if he can’t start yet, you should be able to manage without him for a little longer.”

Right; he hadn’t really explained. Jim would have a hard time working while worrying about his Guide, but that wasn’t really the issue. “It’s not that. He’s got casts on both hands, and a lot of other injuries—I have to feed him and give him his meds every couple of hours, and he’s just not ready to be left alone.”

“Oh,” said Simon. 

“The casts are going to be on for six to eight weeks,” Jim added. “I don’t plan to take that whole time off.” He knew he didn’t have to mention that he’d be entitled to do so, if he insisted on it. “Once I do come back, I’ll need a full hour lunch break so I can come home and look after him in the middle of the day for at least a couple of weeks. I’m not sure when he’ll be ready to come in to the department with me—we’ll have to play that part by ear—but I’m not taking him out into the field until he’s one hundred percent.” 

“I don’t understand why G-TAC sent you home with an injured Guide. Wouldn’t it be better for them to take care of him until he’s ready to work with you?”

“No.” Jim realized abruptly that he couldn’t tell Simon that G-TAC were the ones who had hurt his Guide. He’d find out eventually—Jim would tell him eventually—but Simon would assume that they must have had a good reason. He wanted Simon to get to know Sandburg first, so there was a better chance he’d understand. “That’s not feasible,” he said instead of explaining. “He needs to be with me.” Jim hoped that Simon would assume he was referring to some sort of private Sentinel-Guide business.

Evidently it worked. Simon sighed heavily but said, “I understand. I’ll reassign your open cases. When you do come back, you’re going to be on desk duty and low-priority cases until you and your Guide are ready.”

“Fair enough. I’ll keep you posted about when I’ll be able to come back. I hope it’s not more than a week or two.” 

“All right. Congratulations,” he added belatedly. “Is that what you say?”

“Uh, for a Bonding, yeah, but we aren’t. It is good news, though. Apart from him being hurt. I think it’s going to work out well for me, and for the department.” He had no particular reason for thinking that, other than that Sandburg was very brave, but he figured getting in some positive PR in advance of explaining that G-TAC considered Jim’s new Guide a dangerous renegade couldn’t hurt. 

“I’ll look forward to meeting him. Let me know if there’s anything else you need from me, or from the department.”

#

When Blair woke just enough to register that he was unrestrained, his raised one hand to rub at an itch on his forehead—and promptly clonked himself in the face with his cast. “Ouch,” he muttered, then belatedly remembered that he was in the home of a Sentinel, who was doubtless completely uninterested in listening to him talk to himself. 

And he really didn’t want to upset Jim right now, because the next thing he noticed was that he was in very real danger of pissing himself if he didn’t get to a toilet in the next few minutes. He opened his eyes and was glad to see Jim sitting on the other sofa. Good—if he was in another room, Blair would have had to choose between calling out for him and trying to make it to the bathroom on his own—waiting was _not_ an option. He struggled to sit up, hoping the movement would get Jim’s attention.

Luckily, it worked. “Hey,” Jim said, lowering a folder that he was reading. “How are you feeling?”

“Um. Okay.” 

“Your G-TAC file,” Jim explained, holding up the folder for a second before dropping it on the coffee table. “Interesting reading. We should probably get you something else to eat—anything in particular you’d like to have?”

“Um.” He was not at all embarrassed, Bair told himself. It was a perfectly natural bodily function. He did, however, want to make sure he asked in a way that didn’t give Jim any reason to say no. “Do you think I could possibly go to the bathroom first?”

“Sure thing, Chief.” 

Blair let out a sigh of relief. Thank _God_. Jim bent over him, letting Blair get an arm around his neck, and picked him up. Once they were in the bathroom, Jim sat him on the toilet, pulled his pants down, and tucked his penis inside the rim of the toilet seat. Good. Blair didn’t much like pissing sitting down, but it was preferable by far to having Jim hold his penis for him, which was the other option available under the circumstances. 

“I’ll be right outside, when you’re done,” Jim said.

Blair barely managed to hang on until he was outside the door. Releasing his painfully full bladder felt almost orgasmically good; he wasn’t sure, but he might even have moaned a little bit. It went on and on—by the time he finally stopped, Blair was starting to worry about overflowing the bowl. 

He knew that Jim was listening—just outside the bathroom door, he couldn’t _help_ hearing—but he didn’t come in. Was Blair supposed to ask him to come in and take him off the toilet?

Apparently so. “I’m, uh, done in here.”

Jim came in immediately, and helped Blair up with as little fanfare as he’d helped him down. He hesitated in front of the sink for a moment, then realized, “I guess you don’t really have to wash your hands.”

“No,” Blair agreed. Jim might want to wash his, but that was no concern of his.

“So, what did you want to eat? Here, why don’t you sit at the table while I see what we have.” 

Jim stopped by the table and pulled out one of the chairs with his foot, but didn’t put him down. Blair realized after a moment that he was actually waiting for Blair to agree. “Okay.”

Now Jim did put him down. Crossing over to the refrigerator, he opened it. “We have…not much. Eggs again? Leftover lo-mein—that looks like it’s still good. Half a head of lettuce. Some sandwich stuff.” 

Evidently finding nothing to his liking, Jim closed the refrigerator and opened a pantry cupboard. “In here we’ve got soup, and mac and cheese, and…other soup. I really need to get to the store.” Jim turned and looked at him. “You want to pick something, Chief? Those are pretty much all the options.”

“Oh!” He hadn’t really registered that Jim wanted him to decide. Soup would be easy on his stomach, but having it fed to him would be tricky—in his time as a personal attendant, he’d never really mastered feeding soup without getting any on Ty’s shirt. Mac and cheese would be the easiest for Jim to feed him, but it was probably that awful neon orange stuff out of a box. “Uh, sandwich, I guess?”

Jim got out sandwich supplies, saying, “I’m going to have to see if I can get out of the house tomorrow. I really don’t like the idea of leaving you alone, but we have to get you some clothes and stuff, and some more groceries. Turkey okay?”

“Sure.” Given recent experience, Blair didn’t much like the idea of being left, either, but he wondered what Jim’s objection was. He supposed Jim didn’t trust him—why would he, especially after reading that file?—but there wasn’t a whole lot of trouble Blair could get into at the moment. 

“I got started on a list,” Jim continued, picking up a pad of paper and putting it on the table in front of Blair. “Look that over and let me know what I’m missing. Mayo or mustard?”

“Mayo, I guess.” If he’d had time to think about it, Blair would have expected the list to say something like, “Clothes, toiletries, food.” For himself, he only made shopping lists when he needed something that he didn’t think he’d remember at the store, like toilet paper or dish washing liquid. But Jim’s list was a meticulously organized thing of beauty. The list was broken down by store—Jim apparently planned to go to Wal-Mart, Safeway, and Trader Joe’s, probably in that order, if the layout of the list was any indication—and then by department within each store. From “Socks—6 pr” to “razor—ask what kind!!”, each item was listed with sizes, amounts, and other specifications. In the grocery section, for instance, he’d written that he planned to buy not “orange juice,” but “64-ounce Tropicana OJ no pulp.” 

The man was seriously anal. The kind of guy his mother would say must have been toilet-trained at gunpoint. Oh, yeah, he and Blair were going to get along just _great_.

“Think of anything?” Jim asked, coming over with two sandwiches on plates. Both were, Blair noted, centered perfectly on the plates, and cut evenly in half. Probably down to the micrometer. All of the ingredients were contained completely within the area of the bread—no bits of lettuce or other fillings sticking out of the edges.

“Uh, looks pretty thorough.”

Jim made another trip to the refrigerator and came back with a beer and a glass of water. Putting the water in front of Blair’s place and raising the beer bottle slightly, he said, “You probably shouldn’t have one of these, with the meds and everything.”

“Probably not,” Blair agreed. He hoped Jim wasn’t planning to get drunk. One of his previous Sentinels had been a mean drunk—and a lightweight, too. But one beer wasn’t much for most people. It was probably okay. 

Since Jim had made a sandwich for himself, Blair expected that he would eat first, then help him. But to his surprise, Jim took one bite from his own sandwich, then put it down and held Blair’s sandwich out to him. They alternated bites for the rest of the meal. 

Blair wasn’t surprised to find that the sandwich was extremely bland. It was made on spongy, tasteless white bread, with absolutely flavorless turkey, and iceberg lettuce that provided a little crunch, but nothing else. From what little he’d been able to find out, most American Sentinels limited themselves to the blandest of foods. A second glance at Jim’s shopping list confirmed his suspicions—Jim was probably used to eating a narrow selection of items that he knew wouldn’t cause a sensory spike or zoneout. The pulp-free orange juice was just about the most exciting thing on the list.

It didn’t have to be that way. Sentinels in societies around the world ate the full range of the local diet, including things that were flavorful and even spicy. He knew better now, though, than to say anything directly. Still, he wondered if at some point, he might be able to coax Jim into being a little more adventurous. 

Eventually. It was almost like he was expecting to be here for a while. How long did he think Jim would be willing to put up with him?

At the moment, it was probably unthinkable for Jim to send him back to G-TAC. Jim knew perfectly well that if Blair was sent back, they’d hurt him again. But once Blair’s injuries healed, and Jim’s Blessed Protector instincts died down…well, his feelings could change. 

But maybe not. The other Sentinels had barely been able to stand the sight of him—they hadn’t tried to hide that, not that they _would_ have been able to hide it from a Guide. Jim seemed to actually sort of _like_ him. That would make it easier to cooperate with him once he started throwing his weight around. It could actually work out. 

And if it did, he’d be spending the rest of his life following the Sentinel around, with no work of his own, no function beyond soothing the Sentinel’s senses with his mere physical presence. That was the best he could hope for. The last bite of his sandwich seemed like a clump of papier-mâché in his suddenly-dry mouth. 

“You okay, Chief?” Jim asked.

“Yeah,” he said, swallowing with an effort. “Fine.” It wasn’t as though, if he proved himself useless as a Guide, G-TAC would just let him go. He had thought that, or hoped that, at first, but it was clearly not going to happen. Jim at least seemed _decent_ —different enough from Blair in his basic outlook on life that they were unlikely to become great friends, even if they had met under vastly better circumstances, but by far more bearable than the Sentinels G-TAC had assigned him to. He was going to do his best to make this work.

When Jim took him back to the couch, though, he was reminded that his best efforts might not be good enough. His G-TAC file was still there on the coffee table, and Jim had been reading it. Blair had no idea what was in there, but it couldn’t possibly be very flattering. 

“I’m taking it with a grain of salt, Chief,” Jim said.

Blair wondered for a moment if he’d said something aloud—but no, the Sentinel had just noticed what he was looking at. 

“Here,” Jim added, getting out his next dose of pills. After helping Blair swallow them, he said, “I do have a couple of questions, but they can wait, if you’re not feeling up to it.”

Between a couple of good meals and the pain pills, he actually wasn’t feeling too bad—his hands were down to a dull ache, and just about everything hurt when he moved, but it wasn’t anything he couldn’t handle. Besides, he’d rather answer the questions than worry about them. “What kind of questions?”

“Mostly I’m wondering where you were during the seven-year gap in your file,” Jim answered. “I was figuring you were just drafted recently—no offense, but you don’t look twenty-six.”

Oh. “I was, um, out of the country.”

“Doing what?”

What did he _think_? There was no point trying to lie; it had to be in the file. “Dodging the draft.” 

“I guessed that.” Jim sounded slightly irritated.

“Well, that’s what I was doing.”

“And?”

“And what?” That was certainly the only detail about his life that anyone at G-TAC had cared about, or any of the other Sentinels. 

“What did you do for all that time? Is that where you went to college? I’m just curious, Chief—I figure there has to be more to you than what’s in here.” He gestured to the file.

Jim’s interest could be a good sign. His previous Sentinels had expected him to do nothing more than sit still and be quiet, but a lot of Guides had a secondary role in some support-staff position at their Sentinels’ workplaces. If Jim would let him do something like that, maybe he at least wouldn’t be bored out of his mind every moment of every day. “Okay. Uh, I went to college at Rainer, actually, here in Cascade.” That was why he’d ended up in the G-TAC branch here; it was the only US address they had for him. “Then when I turned eighteen and had to register for the draft, I signed up for study abroad so I could get out of the country on a student visa.” 

“Where was that?”

“Spain.” He quashed the impulse to elaborate—Jim didn’t want to hear every thought that drifted though Blair’s head. None of his other Sentinels had, and they hadn’t been shy about making sure he knew it. If he stuck to short, direct answers, he could avoid babbling like he had over lunch.

“Okay. What did you do then? Did you finish college?”

He nodded. 

“So you have a degree in—what, anthropology?”

Right, they had covered that earlier. “Yeah.”

“That’s good—I think it makes a difference in what pay scale you get with the PD. What else did you do? Did you work?”

“I went to graduate school,” Blair said flatly. 

“Oh?”

“I have a Masters in anthropology, and I was about halfway done with the coursework for my doctorate.” He’d made the serious mistake of mentioning that to his first Sentinel, who’d been under the impression that Blair was extremely stupid. It hadn’t helped much. After that, he’d thought that Blair thought he was smarter than him—which he was, and did. 

“Oh.” Jim sat back in his seat, looking deep in thought. Finally he said, “I’m really sorry to hear that, Chief.”

“Why?” It couldn’t be that Jim had some sort of personal dislike of anthropologists—that would be even stranger than the rest of the day had been.

“It sounds like you had plans for how you wanted your life to turn out.”

Oh. Sympathy. He hadn’t expected that. “Most people do.” That came out more sharply than he intended. Most people did, but most Guides didn’t—or else their plans revolved around how to be the best Guide they could possibly be. 

“I guess so. How did—if you don’t mind me asking—how did G-TAC get you? I know most of Europe doesn’t extradite draft dodgers.”

They didn’t, and Blair knew he should have just stayed over there, where he was safe. “I came back to the US—there was this conference in Charleston—and they picked me up at Customs in the airport,” he explained reluctantly. 

“That sounds like it was kind of a dumb move, Chief.” 

“Yeah, it was.” He sighed. “I’d been back maybe half a dozen times, different reasons. The first time was the summer after my first year in graduate school—there was this expedition I wanted to go on, to study this remote tribe in South America. The only way to get there was to fly into Dallas and then take a bus to this little airstrip outside of town and get on this little two-prop plane that they chartered for the expedition team. I’d already been accepted on the team by the time I found out about that part—I asked if there was some other way, if maybe I could fly into Mexico City or something and meet up with them somewhere else, but they said no, and if it was that much of a problem, maybe I should just not go. But of course it was too late by then to apply for another expedition. So I thought about it, and then I decided, I could either go or I could live in fear. So I went.” When Blair noticed he was babbling again, he abruptly stopped talking. He’d been running over his mistakes in his head for the last year and a half or so; it was almost a relief to tell someone else about it, but Jim couldn’t want to hear it.

“But nothing happened that time?”

“No,” Blair agreed. He should have just stopped there, but like usual, he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. “I just about had a heart attack going through Customs that time, but I got in and out with no trouble at all, on the way down or the way back. After that I came back a couple more times—first just expeditions where I had to travel through a US airport, then I came to a conference and stayed in the US for a couple of days, once I even went along as a TA on this student trip through the Southwest—Anasazi villages. I was here for two weeks that time. By the time the Charleston conference came around, I wasn’t really worried about it. I figured they’d, I don’t know, forgotten about me or something.” Forgotten, or didn’t care, or had decided that since he was well over the usual draft age, it wouldn’t be worth the trouble to bother him. Clearly, he’d been wrong. 

“I guess not,” Jim said. “So you’ve traveled a lot?”

“Just about every summer.” Now, if he was very, very lucky, he’d be spending the rest of his life in Cascade, Washington, perhaps with occasional visits to whatever Jim Ellison considered an exciting vacation destination. Probably something with a golf course. He looked like the all-inclusive resort type. Blair managed not to say any of that out loud.

“I got around quite a bit, in the Army, but I’m mostly sticking close to home these days.” Jim cleared his throat. “I guess since you showed me yours, I should show you mine. I grew up not far from here, then I went into the Army—you were awake when I talked about that with Kas and Temas, weren’t you?”

“Yeah.” He had vague memories of a small, fierce Sentinel yelling at Jim, and a very large Guide who had apparently met Jim a long time ago, and there had been something about the Army in there. 

“I was in the Army for ten years—lot of it in the Middle East, a little bit in South America—then I left and joined the police department here. Now I’m a detective with Major Crimes. Not really as interesting as yours.”

A detective. That was good—better than military or a security guard, or even a beat cop. Blair was pretty sure a Sentinel had to be dumb as a box of rocks not to make detective; one of his previous Sentinels had been a beat cop. Remembering that he was hoping Jim would let him do something when he went to work with him, Blair thought about what skills he had that Jim might care about. “I can type,” he offered. Or he could, anyway, when he had the use of his hands. “And I’m okay on the computer.” A lot of cops weren’t. “And I speak Spanish.” Some other languages, too, but Spanish was the one that was likely to come in handy in an American police department.

“I can see how that would come in handy, being a graduate student in Spain.”

“Yeah.” Jim wasn’t following him. “I mean, there might be some things I can do to help you, when you’re working.” As an anthropologist, he was also trained in observing and talking to people—but to point that out would definitely be overstepping his bounds. He’d count himself lucky if he got to help type up the reports. 

“That’s good, Chief. When you’re ready to go back to work, we’ll have to talk about what you can do, and put together a resume for HR, so they can start you out at the right pay grade.”

Jim seemed pretty worried about his pay—well, Blair was probably going to cost him a lot of money before he was even able to work, so that made sense. The other Sentinels had been satisfied with accepting the basic pay increase that came with having any Guide, but if he was contributing more to the household finances, that would be another reason for Jim to keep on putting up with him. “Anything else you wanted to know?”

“That was the main thing.” Jim picked up the G-TAC file and looked through it. “You were placed with three other Sentinels before me?”

He nodded. 

“Any particular reason it didn’t work out with any of them?”

That, Blair was sure, the file did explain. It had to. So what was Jim after? 

Maybe he wanted to see if Blair would lie. Or rather, if he’d contradict what the file said. “It was my fault,” he made himself say, even though it wasn’t. It was his _behavior_ —his refusal to cooperate with every asinine and humiliating restriction that was placed on him—but it wasn’t his fault. 

“Right, that’s what this says,” Jim answered. “I was kind of curious about your side of the story.”

His side of the story. Did that mean Jim figured he would lie, and wanted to know what lies he’d tell? Or—

Hell, his Sentinel had been righteously pissed off when he’d found that G-TAC had broken his other hand. Jim hadn’t wanted them to do that, and if they hadn’t, he’d wouldn’t be stuck spending the next two months waiting on his Guide hand and foot. Maybe Jim wasn’t in a mood to trust what G-TAC had to say about him. If he was really careful about it, maybe he _could_ tell a little of his “side of the story.” If he avoided criticizing the other Sentinels, and didn’t try to paint himself as completely blameless—which he wasn’t, anyway—maybe Jim would actually be a little understanding about it. 

While he was still thinking about how to begin, Jim said, “I want this to work out with us, Chief. If I can understand what went wrong with the other Sentinels, maybe we can work out how we’re going to get along.” 

He was telling the truth, Blair realized. About both things. The reason he wanted this to work out probably came down to his Blessed Protector instincts, but that was something Blair could use. And he really did seem to think that it wasn’t entirely up to Blair to make sure that they “got along.”

Finally, he found a place to begin. “The Sentinels G-TAC placed me with were…very strict.” There, that sounded like he was mostly blaming G-TAC for making a bad match, right? “And I’m, um, not very good with that. Or not used to it. My mom, growing up, she was more like a friend than a mom. So I never really had the whole ‘do it because I said so’ thing before. And in academia, you’re allowed to argue with people, even if they’re higher up the totem pole than you are, as long as you have good reasons to back up what you’re saying. So I kept trying to, you know, do what would have worked in my old life. G-TAC and my other Sentinels, they didn’t like that much.” He wondered if he should say that he knew better now. He did, but the problem wasn’t so much that he didn’t get it, as that he didn’t want to get it, and he didn’t always think it through before he talked. 

“If I wanted you to have an opinion, I would have issued you one,” Jim said. 

Blair’s stomach twisted. “Okay, see, that is just not fucking fair. If you want me to keep my mouth shut, don’t fucking ask.” And there was an example of the whole problem right there. He should not have said that. It was absolutely true, but he shouldn’t have said it.

“Whoa, hold on, Chief,” Jim said, holding up one hand. “I wasn’t—that’s just something they used to say in boot camp. Out in the real world, it’s an ugly attitude to have, I know.”

Oh. “Sorry,” he muttered.

“The thing is, in boot camp you’re dealing with eighteen and nineteen-year-old kids, who need to be taken down a peg and learn that the sun doesn’t rise and set out of their ass. After boot camp, even in the military, good officers want you to be able to think for yourself. There’s a time and a place for shutting up and doing as you’re told, and a time and a place for using your own initiative. You get that, right?”

“Sort of,” he muttered, wondering where Jim was going with this.

“You’d almost have to. In grad school, you don’t stand up in the middle of a class and tell the professor he’s being an idiot, right? There’s a right way and a wrong way to do it.”

Blair nodded. “You go to his office hours and ask him to help you understand his reasoning, or you write a paper where you look at his evidence and show how you interpret it differently.” Right now, he’d give just about anything to go to someone’s office and discuss a point of intellectual disagreement, even if the person he was disagreeing with was a complete idiot.

“Right. And you managed that, before?”

“Yeah.” It hadn’t always been easy—as an undergrad, he’d been kind of a brat—but he had learned.

“Okay. So you just have to learn the right way to disagree with somebody where you are now.”

If only it was that easy. “With G-TAC, there is no right way.”

“Yeah,” Jim said patiently, “but you’re not there anymore. Look, if it’s just us, and you want to tell me I’m being an idiot, or I’m not being fucking fair, or whatever, just tell me. Once we’re back at work—well, it depends. If we were in a meeting with my Captain and you had a little outburst like that, he’d tear a strip off both of our hides, so save it until we’re out of there. If I’m questioning a witness or a suspect, anything you say I could end up having to talk about in court, so keep your mouth shut unless you’re absolutely sure you have something to contribute. You’re a smart guy, you’ll be able to work it out.”

It would be easier if Jim would just tell him what the rules were—but then, maybe Jim didn’t really know, or couldn’t put them into words. Plenty of people had trouble articulating the social norms of their own society; that was why anthropologists had to observe and look at evidence, and not just ask people what they did and why they did it. And he’d been observing and learning about the customs of different societies since he was sixteen. Jim was right; it was something he knew how to do. 

He didn’t entirely buy that he could say anything he wanted to Jim when they were alone—there were limits, but Jim probably didn’t know what they were. Right now Blair was so physically vulnerable that there might not be anything he could say or do that would register as a threat to his Sentinel’s authority, but as he started to recover, that would change. As long as Jim was reasonably tolerant of experimentation, he could work out where the line was, and keep behind it. It was a new thought. His previous Sentinels had known when he was so much as _thinking_ something they didn’t like, and that was something he really couldn’t help. “Okay,” he agreed. “Yeah, I will.”

“Good. So you know how to act at a workplace. And around the house—I’m used to having things my own way, but I can be flexible.”

Blair tried not to let his skepticism show on his face. Jim looked about as flexible as an oak two-by-four. 

“There are a couple of things I can’t be flexible about,” Jim added. “You can’t…torture small animals or set fire to the house.”

Blair wondered why he felt like he had to mention those two things specifically. What the hell was _in_ that file? “I wasn’t planning to.”

“I didn’t think so.” Jim hesitated. “One thing that we do have to be clear on.”

“Yes?”

“It says in the file that you registered as a conscientious objector.”

“Uh…yeah.” Ex-Army-Ranger Jim probably loved that. He’d petitioned for CO status when he first registered for the draft, when he had been on the fence about whether to try to escape or just face the music. Registering as a CO wouldn’t have kept him from being drafted at all, but would have gotten him a placement outside the military.

“I do carry a gun on the job, and I have had to use it on the job. I’m sure I will again. You don’t have to like it, but that’s how it is.” 

“Not a problem,” Blair assured him, vastly relieved. He didn’t particularly _like_ guns, but since the criminals had them, on balance he was glad that the cops did, too. 

“Good. Police assignments are on the approved list for CO’s anyway, so there isn’t much we could do about it if it was a problem.”

Blair thought for a moment. He’d never found out if his CO petition had come through or not—he’d found out how low his draft number was and left the country before it was processed—but it was pretty unusual that he had never been given a military placement. Draftees ordinarily went into one of the armed services for their first placement; civilian placements were granted either as a reward for long service or when a Guide followed a Sentinel out of the military. “They actually have me listed as a CO?”

“Yeah—you didn’t notice you’re not in the military, Chief?”

Blair couldn’t help it; he laughed. “Right, because then G-TAC would be violating my civil rights.” They were allowed to kidnap him in an airport, beat him and starve him for a year and a half, and they apparently were even allowed to break his fingers, but because he’d written a letter eight years ago, they couldn’t put him into the army. It was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard, but absolutely typical of bureaucracy at work. 

Jim apparently caught on to the absurdity, because he started laughing too, and once he did, Blair couldn’t stop. Partly it was because Jim’s feeling of hilarity was feeding into his, and probably vice-versa: as a Guide, he was sensitive to a Sentinel’s feelings; that was one of the things that made living with a Sentinel who hated him so uniquely hellish. But it was also a release valve for the terrible tension of the day—between his fear and anger at being tortured, his relief at being rescued, and his anxiety over whether he’d be able to make it work with Jim, he was pretty wound up. 

Several times, he thought he was going to be able to stop laughing, but then he’d catch a look at Jim, or at the G-TAC file, and he’d start up again. By the time he had finally slowed to the occasional hiccup, his abdomen ached from the inside out, but he felt more relaxed than he could remember feeling, and Jim also seemed more at ease than he had been all day. 

“You’re really something, Chief,” Jim said, with obvious fondness. 

Jim seemed to think they had done enough talking for one day—Blair, unusually for him, felt talked-out too—and picked up the TV remote. 

Blair dozed lightly on the couch, soothed by the sound of the TV and—as much as he hated to admit it—the presence of a relaxed, happy Sentinel. 

#

Fixing their breakfast the next morning, Jim decided that Sandburg—Blair, he’d learned the kid’s name from the G-TAC file—looked better already. He was still too thin, and still held himself like he was in pain, but he didn’t look quite so weak and scared. “Did you sleep okay, Chief?”

“Yeah—yeah, thanks.”

“Good. Plan for the day—first I’m going to try to get some of that junk cleaned out of your room. If that goes all right, and neither of us completely freaks out while I’m in the basement, I’ll try to get out to the stores after lunch.”

“Okay. What do you want me to do?”

“Sit on the couch and heal,” Jim told him. There wasn’t much else Sandburg _could_ do at the moment. “You can watch TV, if you want to.”

“Yeah, that’d be good,” Blair said, sounding pleasantly surprised. “Thanks.”

It was painfully obvious that Blair was unused to being treated with even basic courtesy—last night when Jim had tucked him into bed, he’d seemed surprised not to have been tossed into a corner with a couple of dirty rags, or something. Jim was not normally solicitous—and he really hoped that in time Blair would come to need less reassurance that he was allowed to act like a goddamn human being—but for now, he figured it was necessary to spell things out. 

So after breakfast, he settled Blair on the couch, put the remote in his right hand, and made sure he could reach the channel button with his thumb, before he got down to work. 

He hadn’t made much use of his storage area in the basement, simply because he had the room off the kitchen to use for that. He decided to haul everything down there first—that way he’d be in and out of the apartment every few minutes, so he could reassure himself that Blair was perfectly all right. 

On the first trip, he tried leaving the front door unlocked, just pulling it closed behind him—the building entry was secured by an electronic keypad, and he trusted his neighbors, so there was no reason to lock and unlock the door on each of what was going to be at least twenty trips to and from the basement. But as he was riding down in the elevator, he noticed that he was obsessively tracking the sounds coming from his apartment, alert for any sign of distress from his Guide. He couldn’t quite hear Blair’s heartbeat over the TV, and he wondered if he’d be able to hear if someone opened the door to the apartment, or even if Sandburg yelled. When the elevator finally reached the basement, he unceremoniously dumped the boxes he was carrying just outside the elevator, and raced back to the apartment.

Blair was, of course, fine. He glanced over at the door when Jim came in, then returned his attention to the TV, where he was watching something on one of the educational channels. 

His Guide was perfectly safe, Jim told himself. There was absolutely nothing to worry about. Still, on each of the other trips, he went out the door, put down the stuff he was carrying, and locked the deadbolt behind him, before proceeding to the basement. It took about twice as long, but it made him feel better.

By the time he had everything down in the basement, he felt confident enough to stay down there for a while, figuring out the best way to arrange the stuff in his storage unit. It would all fit, but anything he put at the back would be a real pain in the ass to get out. So he wanted his fishing and golf gear at the front; he knew he’d want that again soon. And at the back—maybe those boxes he’d never unpacked from his last apartment, but before he buried them under a mountain of other stuff, maybe he had better check what was in them. 

Most of them were crammed full of odds and ends he might as well have thrown away rather than move—and he’d moved them twice now—but one was full of textbooks. He didn’t have nearly as much education as Sandburg, but he had gone to Officer Candidate School, and the police academy, and special Sentinel courses in both OCS and the Academy. Sandburg obviously liked school, so maybe he’d want to read up on what he was going to be doing. Not the military history and tactics stuff, but some of the others might be useful for him. Jim sat that box aside to take back upstairs.

About halfway through the process of arranging his stuff in the storage unit, he decided it would be a good, sensible idea to take the books upstairs now. To do it, he’d have to leave thousands of dollars of difficult-to-replace sporting goods unsecured, where anyone who gained access to the building could steal them. And that was a hell of a lot more likely than anybody breaking into his apartment and doing anything to his Guide—but he was clearly going to leave it sitting out anyway, just so he could reassure himself that Sandburg was perfectly fine.

If he didn’t get over this soon, it was going to become a real problem. Blair seemed to be handling it just fine—when Jim came up with the box of books, he gave him a, “Hi,” in addition to the usual look of acknowledgement—but his heart rate, breathing, and every other observable detail suggested he wasn’t at all distressed.

Then again, Blair was drugged up to his eyeballs. That might have something to do with why he was handling it better than Jim.

“I thought you might want to look at these,” Jim said, hefting the box of books in illustration. “Do you want to look now, or should I put them in your room?”

“What is it?”

“Books.”

Sandburg practically bounced. “Now, please.”

As soon as he put the box down on the coffee table, Blair leaned forward to try to get at it with his casted hands. 

Jim had definitely gotten one thing right, anyway. “They’re not all that exciting,” Jim warned him. “But I thought you might want to read about your new job.” 

“Yeah, definitely!” He tried to pry up flaps of the box with his one good thumb. 

“Here, let me get that for you.” Peeling off several layers of packing tape, he got the box open. When he started taking books out, he’d have thought he was giving Sandburg a box full of solid gold, not some ratty old textbooks he hadn’t thought about or looked at in years. 

He took out each book one by one, giving Sandburg a chance to examine it. There was something incredibly gratifying, for him at least, about making a Guide happy. It was sort of like pleasing a beloved parent, satisfying a stern teacher, and rubbing the belly of an affectionate puppy, all at the same time. It was no wonder G-TAC warned against over-indulging Guides; it would be easy to become addicted to the feeling. 

But Sandburg was long overdue for a getting a little enjoyment out of life. If the Guide was that excited about having something to read, he’d have to find out what kind of books he actually liked, and get him some. Maybe books on tape, for when Jim was at work. With his hands the way they were—turning pages would be hard. 

But turning over tapes would be just about impossible. That wouldn’t work. They were putting books on CD now, weren’t they? He had a three-disc changer, he could load it up with CDs before he left for work, and change them again when he was home at lunchtime. That might be a workable plan.

Once they had looked through the whole box, Blair said, “Do you mind if I read one? Now, I mean?”

“Go ahead. Which one do you want?”

Sandburg picked out a book on law enforcement techniques for Sentinels. It was one of the more advanced texts, but hell, if he was in over his head, he’d figure it out soon enough. Jim got him set up with the book on a pillow in his lap, open to the first page. Blair should be able to turn the pages with his good thumb. 

By the time Jim headed back down to the basement, Sandburg was thoroughly engrossed.

#

On one level, Blair was disgusted with himself for being so grateful to Jim for giving him something to read. He _shouldn’t_ be disgusted with himself—it wasn’t his fault; he should be disgusted with the people who had put him in a position where something so basic was a privilege so remote he’d barely dreamed of it. 

But on another level, he was in hog heaven. He’d have been happy with anything to read—a box of paperback Westerns or back issues of Readers Digest would have been a hundred times better than nothing. But here—what he had here was a box full of _primary source material_ on the training and education of the modern North American Sentinel. 

The books weren’t a perfect match for his academic interests—he’d been specializing in Sentinels and Guides in pre-industrialized societies—but the subject of American Sentinels had a whole new relevance for him, and the chance to read anything that was at all associated with his field of study was…well, it was something he’d never expected to be able to do again. 

He recognized that Jim hadn’t realized quite what he was doing, or quite how big of a deal it was. As far as he was concerned, he was just giving Blair a chance to learn a little bit about where he’d be working. But now Blair had a whole new way to think about what was happening to him. 

This was—he could tell himself—a very long research trip. He was studying North American Sentinels in their natural setting. It was a participant-observer study, so he was living and working alongside his primary research subject. He was operating under some significant handicaps—for one thing, he couldn’t contextualize his research with any previous findings from other researchers in the field—but he did remember quite a bit of what he’d already learned about Sentinels in non-industrialized societies, so he could at least catalogue the significant differences. Maybe later, he could convince Jim to let him have a library card—

No. He wasn’t going to get ahead of himself. He had what he had, and it was a lot more than he had at this time yesterday. 

He had enough source material to keep him busy for a long time, and he had a good memory—living for months at a time among people who had no system of reading or writing would do that for you. Maybe once he had the use of his hands back, he could get some kind of a notebook and write a little bit about what he was learning. Even if no one ever read it, he could hold on to some fragment of his identity as a scholar. It was enough. He was lucky.

He made himself read slowly, instead of downing the book in greedy gulps—normally, he’d read a textbook or journal article once through fast, then go back to study the interesting parts in more detail. But Jim might figure that once he’d read each book once, he was done with them, so he had better make them last.

Still, but the time Jim came back, he’d read the first two chapters, which gave an overview of police procedures and Sentinel abilities. “Having fun?” Jim asked him.

He nodded eagerly. “Yeah.”

“Good.” He seemed to mean it, too. “Mac and cheese okay for lunch?”

“Sure.” He didn’t even care if it was the neon-orange stuff; he just wondered if Jim would mind if he kept reading for a little longer.

He apparently didn’t; Blair was allowed to keep reading until Jim came back to carry him over to the table. As they ate, Jim said, “We’re going to have to re-think my shopping plans—I’m starting to think they were way too ambitious.”

His mouth full of macaroni, Blair nodded in what he hoped was an encouraging way. He wasn’t sure what Jim was getting at, exactly, but Jim didn’t seem to expect him to say much.

“I know you’ll be fine—there’s no reason you wouldn’t be safe here—but I’m just not willing to let you out of my sight for that long yet.”

“Okay,” Blair said, giving himself some time to think.

“One idea I had, I could take you along and have you wait in the truck while I run into the stores and get what we need. I’d probably feel better about that, but it doesn’t actually make sense—nothing’s going to happen to you here, and nothing’s going to happen to you in the truck, but there’s maybe a tiny bit more of a chance of something going wrong if you’re sitting in a parking lot by yourself. Somebody decides to steal my truck, and you’re gone.”

Now he understood--it was Jim’s Blessed Protector instincts that were the problem, Blair realized. Because of the trauma of having Blair hurt when again after Jim already considered him under his protection, Jim was irrationally anxious about leaving him alone again.

In a traditional culture, a Guide would have tools at his disposal to address this problem—a tribe or village wouldn’t’ survive for long if its Sentinel was crippled by any threat to his Guide. In the remote villages of Tibet, the Guide would lead his Sentinel in a meditation to calm his anxieties. In any of several Native American traditions, where Guides were also trained as Shamans, an injured but functioning Guide would be able to go into a trance and release an animal spirit Guide that would accompany his Sentinel when he could not. In some cases, where the Sentinel also had shamanic talents, the Sentinel might even be able to release his own animal spirit to stay behind and watch over his Guide. Or in other places, the Sentinel and Guide would know how to make protective talismans that would enhance their connection when they had to be apart. Blair knew _about_ those things, but he didn’t know how to do them. Sentinels in industrialized societies had retained a few of the traditions and abilities that they had in tribal cultures—becoming soldiers and police officers, rather than patrolling the borders of the village, for example—but the role of Guide was debased practically out of recognition.

The cultural context was completely screwed-up, too. In North America, and most industrialized countries, Sentinels handled their territorial antipathy for other Sentinels simply by avoiding contact with them. But in a tribe or village situation, a Sentinel and Guide would nearly always share their duties with an older Sentinel-Guide pair who acted as mentors, or would be mentors themselves to a junior pair. Both the clear sense of hierarchy and familiarity—the older pair would have known the younger from birth—would keep the Sentinels from feeling territorially threatened by each other. In that situation, even if there were no mystical protections available, a Sentinel would have someone he felt safe entrusting with an incapacitated Guide. 

Wait. “Kas and Doctor Temas,” Blair said out loud. The other Sentinel and Guide were only a few years older than Jim, but their behavior yesterday had been a damn good approximation of a senior pair with a junior pair—both Temas resolutely calling Jim on what he thought was his aberrant, perverse (in a traditional context) abuse of his Guide, and his later nurturing behavior. Jim had even _suggested_ that Temas and Kas watch over him while he went to the hospital shop. On some level, he recognized them as suitable protectors.

“Them?” Jim considered. “I know they said they’d help, but I don’t really feel comfortable sending them out on errands for us.”

“Oh, that would work too.” Yes, it would also make sense for a Sentinel to ask the other pair to help with hunting or other duties so the Sentinel could stay by his Guide’s side. 

“What would, Chief?”

Blair abruptly realized that Jim was having a completely different conversation than the one he was having in his head. “Sorry, I was thinking about something else.”

“Yeah? What?”

“Oh. Um….” The one time Blair had tried to provide a little anthropological perspective to his first Sentinel, the man had responded that he didn’t ‘give a shit what some native in a grass skirt would do.’ Blair had responded by explaining that the tribe he was talking about didn’t wear grass skirts, and things had devolved from there. But Jim wasn’t like that. He probably wasn’t particularly interested, but he had asked, and Blair was pretty sure he wasn’t going to get into any trouble for answering. “I was just thinking, what a Sentinel in a tribal situation would do if he had a Guide who was hurt, and he had to go out and hunt or something.” Jim wasn’t pissed off yet, so he kept going. “And one thing he might do is ask another Sentinel to help. That’s all.”

Jim nodded. “That makes sense. In the PD and the army, the unbounded Guides are sort of community--” Blair could see him about to say “property,” and, more importantly, saw him choose not to say it. “A community responsibility. We all look out for them.” He thought, then shook his head. “There are a few other Sentinels in the PD, but I don’t really know them. They’re in different precincts and departments, so I haven’t worked with them. It would probably be all right—but you’d probably be okay by yourself, too.” Jim fed him another bite, and took another himself. “Good idea, but I don’t think it’ll work.” He chewed, looking deep in thought. “Maybe—I could ask Simon, if he’d come stay with you for a little while after he gets off work.”

“Simon?”

“My captain. He’s a good guy.” Another few bites, and Jim said, “Yeah, I think that would work. He’s not a Sentinel, but—yeah, I feel like I can trust him.”

“That makes sense. He’s part of your tribe.” Oops. “I mean, not your tribe, but a police department is sort of like a tribe, in some, uh, some ways.”

“No, I know what you mean. I’ll ask him. He did say to let him know if we needed anything.” After a few more bites, he added, “I’ll try to make it sound like it’s some kind of an honor—I’m trusting him with my Guide, that kind of thing.”

“It kind of is,” Blair pointed out. Except that wasn’t something American Sentinels admitted, that Guides were _valuable_. “I mean, it would be. In a non-industrial society. The Sentinel and Guide would be the most important people in the village, it would be like…”

“Like being on the First Lady’s security detail?” Jim suggested.

“Sort of. Or the pope’s.” In a society where the Guide was a Shaman, he’d also be the tribe’s spiritual leader.

“Pope Sandburg.” Jim grinned. “That has kind of a ring to it.”

When Jim made the call to his boss, Blair was surprised—and, he had to admit, pleased—to hear Jim echoing the language that he’d used in his own explanation. “Yeah, Simon, there is something you could do to help.” He listened for a moment. “See, in an ancient tribe--” Jim glanced over at him and smiled “—if a Sentinel had a Guide who was hurt, and he had to go out and hunt, he’d ask one of the most respected warriors to, uh, watch over his Guide while he was out.” Jim laughed. “Yeah, that’s pretty much it. Grocery shopping, and I need to get him some clothes and stuff. You won’t actually have to do anything, I’m just worried about him. You will? Six? Thanks. See you then.”

Blair wondered if Jim really understood what had just happened. In any of the cultures he’d studied, it would be completely ordinary for a Sentinel and Guide to use their different skills and knowledge to arrive at a solution to a problem. Okay, so it hadn’t been a big problem—but for the first time in his life, Blair had, for just a moment, felt like a real Guide, a proper Guide. It was—if it was really like this, he wouldn’t have minded being drafted.

Hanging up, Jim started putting their dishes in the dishwasher. “Maybe having an anthropologist for a Guide is going to come in handy more than I thought. You know anything else about primitive Sentinels, Chief?”

“Oh. Yeah, lots.”

Jim waited for a moment. “Like what?”

“Uh—everything.” Blair would be happy—hell, ecstatic—to tell him, but he had no idea where to start. “I mean, not everything, but that’s what I was studying in graduate school.”

“Really.” Jim came back over and sat down. “Wasn’t expecting that. Why?”

“Why what?”

“I mean, you fled the country to avoid having to work with a Sentinel,” Jim explained. “Then as soon as you get away, you start studying them. Us. That doesn’t quite make sense.”

“It wasn’t that I didn’t want to work with a Sentinel,” Blair began. Now that he understood what Jim was asking, it was a familiar question. A lot of his professors and fellow grad students had wondered the same thing when they found out about both his nationality and his specialization. He wasn’t sure how to explain it to Jim, though—if he started talking about the way the Sentinel-Guide bond had been perverted in industrialized societies in general, and the US in particular, Jim would think he was being insulted. 

“You didn’t want to work for the government?” Jim guessed.

“Sort of. Not really.” He could say that, or he could say something about not wanting to be _forced_ to work with a Sentinel—that wouldn’t be a lie, exactly. But if he was going to try to explain it, he was going to try to get it right. “It’s different, in tribal cultures. I mean—what do Guides do in this country? What are they for?”

Asking the question was a mistake. He wasn’t running an undergrad discussion section. He wasn’t a teacher—he never would be again—and Jim wasn’t his student. His Sentinel asked him a question, and his job was to answer it, not start a Socratic dialogue. 

But Jim just said, “They…help Sentinels. Help them control their senses.”

“How?” Great, now that he’d gotten away with the first one, he was just digging himself in deeper.

Jim thought for a moment, then shrugged. “I don’t really know, Chief. Just by being there, I thought. And the working link. Some kind of telepathic thing. I guess there’s more to it?”

“There’s supposed to be. I mean, there used to be. What we call ‘being a Guide’ just means having this low-level telepathic ability, like you were saying. Basically the electrical activity of our brains is a little bit different from normal humans’, in a way that Sentinels can pick up on and that they instinctively respond to. That’s all. You had to take classes in how to be a Sentinel?”

“How to use it, yeah.”

“Right. Today, in industrialized cultures, being a Guide is something you don’t have to learn to do; it’s just something you are.”

“And you’re saying it’s not?”

“It is—I mean, the actual ability is innate.” On his last expedition, he’d seen something that called even that basic fact into question, but he definitely wasn’t going to talk about that—it was practically heresy, or sedition, and anyway, he had only seen the one example. It might have been a temporary, inadequate solution to a problem. G-TAC had robbed him of any opportunity to follow up on the discovery. “But in tribal cultures, there’s more to it. Guides are as highly trained as Sentinels, in a different way. There are ways to use the telepathic talent to actively influence the Sentinel.”

“ _What_? Like thought control?”

“No! No, not like that.” That was the first thing people thought of, though, and that was what made his work so controversial. “More like, ways to connect with their Sentinels and help them use their senses more effectively—over greater distances, with more precision, different traditions emphasize different things. Nothing too different from what Guides do naturally, but actively, instead of passively.”

“How?”

“I don’t know,” Blair admitted. “I studied some tribal Guides, and they told me what they do, but they only pass the lore to their apprentices.” He had picked up a few things, enough that he had an idea of how he’d start experimenting if he could, but that was something Jim didn’t need to know. He moved on quickly, before Jim picked up on his hesitation and pressed him. “In a lot of cultures, Guides are the ones who teach the Sentinels to use their senses. They learn from the previous Sentinel and Guide, and then identify and train the next Sentinel. It’s also very common for a Guide to also be the tribe’s Shaman—medicine man, wise woman, witch doctor, priest, whatever you want to call it. They commune with the spirit world and perform rituals that benefit the tribe.”

“That’s not real, though? Jim said, with just a hint of a question in his voice. “That’s just primitive superstition.”

Blair shrugged. “It’s religion. Most of it doesn’t have any concrete observable effects, nothing that can be verified.”

“ _Most_ of it?”

“I’ve seen a few things. A Shaman Guide in Peru who could manifest an animal spirit—it was a bear. I mean, I saw it, it was there. And I’ve heard Shamans describing visions that predicted things that actually happened later. Not secondhand accounts—they came out of the vision, personally told me what they saw, and then it happened. There are a few other documented incidents like that in the literature—things trained observers personally saw. And a lot more stories, of course—some of them are pretty outrageous; I heard one about a Guide who brought his Sentinel back from the dead.” He’d written a paper about that one, opening with the provocative question of whether the historical Christ’s miracles could have been Guide powers. The safe, scientific conclusion had, of course, been that there was no way to verify what a man who lived 2000 years ago may or may not have been—but as he’d proven, nearly every miracle that Christian mythology reported Jesus had done, was considered by some tribal culture to be a power that Guides traditionally had. 

“And lots more verified incidents that the people involved explained as being a result of a Guide’s powers, but could have happened some other way. A Shaman-Guide does a healing ritual, and the sick person gets better; maybe they would have recovered anyway, or maybe the plants he used in the ceremony have medicinal properties that science hasn’t discovered yet. Or a Guide does a ceremony to drive away predators or to attract game, and it works. Could be coincidence, could be that the magic powder used in the ceremony has chemical properties that attract or repel wild animals.”

Blair was uncomfortably aware that he’d talked more in the last few minutes than in the last few months, but he wasn’t picking up any hostility or irritation from Jim—he was maybe a little skeptical, but interested. Jim’s next question proved that he was paying attention. “But even if it’s not really magic, the Guide is the one who knows how to make the magic powder, right?”

He usually had to ask a lot more questions to bring students around to that observation. “Exactly. Guides may or may not have abilities that have been lost in our society, but in a tribal culture, they’re very important, with a role that goes well beyond just existing near a Sentinel. Even in societies where Guides aren’t credited with shamanic powers, Guides are usually involved in the governing or spiritual life of the tribe in some important way. Just like the Sentinel is the _tribe’s_ Sentinel, the Guide is the _tribe’s_ Guide, as well as the Sentinel’s Guide.”

“So you weren’t really studying primitive Sentinels, so much as you were studying primitive Guides.”

“I was studying both—they’re so intertwined, you can’t study one and not the other. I was more interested in Guides, yeah,” he admitted, “but Sentinels are considered a more respectable academic subject.” For an anthropologist today to study Guides was, he’d often thought, sort of like a 19th century anthropologist studying women—he might find that personally fascinating, since he _was_ a Guide, but if he had any hopes of being taken seriously as a scholar, shouldn’t he focus on something more important, dear? 

Nowadays, focusing on the role of women in various cultures was considered a legitimate area of study, more or less. A paper about menarche rituals would be titled something about “women’s initiation rites” while one about circumcision would just be “initiation rites,” but no one argued that focusing on women would mean you’d never get tenure. 

But then, tenure was a completely irrelevant consideration for him now. 

“I don’t know, Chief,” Jim was saying. “It seems like if Guides really _did_ have powers that are just as important as what Sentinels have, we’d know about it. I mean, it’s interesting—but America is the most powerful country on Earth, and the people who still believe in all that stuff are--” Jim stopped. “I mean, I don’t want to say they don’t have cars and TV, so there has to be something wrong with them, but if you just look at the map, it looks like our system is winning.”

“No, you’re right—if when our society turned its back on the traditions surrounding Guides, we were actually rejecting something valuable, the big question is why we did it.” 

“And?”

“And that’s where I usually say, time’s up, so think about it and we’ll pick this up next class.”

Jim laughed. “Right, Chief, you’ve been up for a while—think you could use a nap?”

“I could,” he admitted. 

“Right, then, I’ll get started on my homework while you rest, Teach.” 

Jim settled him on the couch, pulling a blanket up over him, and he rested. 

#

While Sandburg slept, Jim sat near him, with what he had to be a pretty sappy expression on his face. It had been a challenge getting him to open up last night, but once you got him started, the kid could talk. The G-TAC file listed complaints about him being “mouthy” and “speaking out of turn,” but Jim didn’t quite understand why anyone would have a problem with it. He always found it a pleasure to listen to a Guide talk, _and_ Sandburg had interesting things to say, _and_ being allowed to talk made him happy. What was not to like? 

But sitting and watching a Guide sleep would be embarrassingly sentimental even for a newly-Bonded pair, which they weren’t. Jim picked up one of his Sentinel textbooks. If he remembered right, that one had a couple of chapters about Guides in it; he could see if there was anything in there that even hinted at what Sandburg had been talking about.

There wasn’t much. The chapters mostly focused on practical things: how to work with an assigned Guide who wasn’t very compatible, how to pick out a Guide if you had a choice, and a stern reminder that Guides were precious and delicate, and should never be abused, followed with a list of ways to do just that if you were one of the unlucky few whose Guide was less than 100% eager to please. 

That wasn’t entirely fair—the list of suggested punishments started with things like removal of privileges and extra chores, things that made up an ordinary part of military discipline, but still seemed like humiliating things to use against a grown adult in their own home. But it also went on to suggest that hitting Guides, or taking away meals, or leaving them in stress positions were last-resort options. 

What the hell had he been thinking, giving Blair these books to read? He ought to throw them away—except Blair had been so happy to get them, and there was some good information, in the other sections. Finally he just folded down the page—he’d tell Blair not to look at it.

No wonder Blair didn’t want to be a Guide. He thought Guides were supposed to be these important people with mystical powers, and here was how his Sentinel was encouraged to see him. 

Finally, near the end of the chapter, he found a sidebar that touched on the topics Blair had been talking about. “There are many rumors and superstitions about primitive Guides with mystical or magical powers, equal or even better than the abilities attributed to primitive Sentinels. But while Sentinel abilities have been verified again and again by scientists, beginning in the late 1700’s and continuing to this day, no scientific evidence has been found for any Guide abilities or talents beyond the low-level telepathy that allows them to be used by a Sentinel to control his senses.” 

Well, that was pretty blunt. Was Sandburg just deluding himself, reading into the stories that primitive people told themselves? It seemed like a more reasonable explanation than a massive conspiracy, or some kind of collective amnesia where the entire civilized world had forgotten about the real value of Guides.

Still, if it came down to either trusting this textbook or trusting his Guide, he wasn’t going to pick the textbook. Sandburg had implied that he did have an explanation; he just hadn’t shared it yet. And his “homework,” as he’d joked, was to try to figure out what it was.

There might be a hint right there in what he’d just read. Blair had mentioned how most of the abilities attributed to Guides could be explained away as coincidence or natural phenomena. Sentinel senses, on the other hand, were solidly testable and verifiable. Maybe as scientific understanding of Sentinel abilities grew, people started to ignore, and eventually forget, Guide abilities that science couldn’t as easily test and explain. 

And he knew that things happened that science couldn’t explain. When he was stationed in Peru, he’d often seen a black jaguar prowling at the edge of the village. None of his men had been able to see it, nor any of the villagers—except for their holy man, Incacha, who had seemed to believe that because Jim was a Sentinel, semi-invisible jaguars were something to be expected. 

Sandburg had mentioned spirit animals, Jim remembered. He had moved on to another subject too quickly for Jim to ask any questions, but he wondered—was the jaguar one of those spirit animals? That would explain why the holy man had seen it—Incacha had spent a lot of time hanging around with Jim, and he’d had more control over his senses than he ever had before during that time. He’d thought it was because he was away from the confusion of the city, in the kind of environment Sentinels evolved to work in—but maybe Incacha had been one of those shaman-Guides Blair was talking about. It had never crossed his mind that Incacha might be a Guide, because he was clearly one of the most important people in the village; everyone had listened to what he had to say, and he was the one chosen to speak to the American soldiers on behalf of the village. 

But if what Blair said was true, Incacha would have been important _because_ he was a Guide, not in spite of it. Hell, they had known he was a Sentinel; maybe that was why they had asked their Guide to act as the intermediary between them and the Americans. The village had lost their own Sentinel, in some incident he never picked up enough of the lingo to really understand. Incacha had seemed really upset when he told him about it—which would fit in with him having been the dead Sentinel’s Guide. 

He could be reading it wrong, but now that it occurred to him that Incacha might have been a Guide, a lot of things made sense that hadn’t before. He’d have to ask Blair about it later. Even if he was totally wrong, the kid would be thrilled to talk about it, Jim was sure. 

As the clock crept past five, and Blair still hadn’t woken up, Jim wondered if he ought to wake him, or just let him sleep. It was past time for one of his small meals, and if he waited much longer, he wouldn’t have time to eat before Simon got there. Still trying to decide, he reviewed his shopping list. He still hadn’t asked Blair what kind of razor he used, or what breakfast cereal he liked. He’d definitely have to wake him before he left, then, to ask. 

He’d start fixing Sandburg’s next meal, he decided, and he wouldn’t be particularly quiet about it. If Blair hadn’t woken up on his own by the time the food was ready, Jim would wake him up.

There wasn’t too much left to choose from, so he made another egg—scrambled—and toasted the heel of the loaf of bread they’d nearly used up for sandwiches. He’d have his own dinner when he made Sandburg’s fifth meal of the day, after he got back from shopping. He’d cook something good. Steaks? Probably didn’t fit Dr. Temas’s prescription for small, light meals—maybe if it was a small steak? Grabbing the shopping list, he added _Steak: 1 lg, 1 sm_ to the bottom, and drew a line to the section of the list that represented the Trader Joe’s meat department.

Maybe he should invite Simon to dinner, too. He wrote in +1? next to the large steak. 

Now the egg was done—a little firmer than he liked, really—and the toast had popped up and was rapidly getting cold. He quickly dished everything up and went into the living room. 

Sandburg had shifted position slightly since Jim saw him last, but still looked asleep. “Hey, Chief, rise and shine.”

Sandburg started awake, and promptly thumped himself in the head with his cast, the same way he’d done every time Jim had seen him wake up so far. Next time Blair went to sleep, Jim was going to put some kind of padding on that thing. “Oh. Hi Jim.”

“Hi. I thought we should get you something to eat, before Simon gets here.”

Blair sat up. “Oh, man, how long was I asleep?”

“Few hours. Probably those meds you’re on,” Jim added. “That’s why Temas suggested you stop taking the good ones during the day after the first few days, so you don’t sleep all the time.”

“Oh, yeah,” Blair said vaguely. He didn’t say much as Jim fed him his scrambled egg, just blinked owlishly and yawned a lot. 

By the time he was finished, though, he seemed to have perked up, so Jim picked up his list. “Couple of things to ask you?”

“Yeah?”

“What kind of razor do you like?”

“Oh. Um, anything, is fine. I’ve used everything from electrics to a sharpened clam shell. Disposables are kind of bad for the environment, though.”

Jim noted down, _Not disposable_. “Okay, and what kind of cereal do you like?”

Blair shook his head. “Anything, I don’t mind.”

That was not helpful. “Bran flakes? Lucky Charms? Give me something to go on, Chief.”

Blair raised his hand to rub at the back of his neck with his cast. “Cheerios?”

“Cheerios it is. And I was thinking about steak for dinner—how does that sound?”

“Fine.”

“You’re not a vegetarian, are you?” He’d given Blair turkey sandwiches already, and vegetable-beef soup. He’d have said something if he didn’t eat meat, wouldn’t he?

“No. I’m really not picky, Jim—you can’t go on anthropological expeditions if you aren’t willing to eat whatever the people eat where you’re going.”

“I guess not,” he agreed. Still, since he was going to two different supermarkets, there was no reason Blair shouldn’t have what he liked. He squinted at another note he’d made on the list. _Personal effects_? What was—oh, right. “Do you have any stuff of your own? At G-TAC, maybe?” When he’d been planning to make this expedition during the day, he had thought he’d deliver the completed forms back to G-TAC while he was out. When the plan changed, he’d dropped them in the mail instead, but if they had Sandburg’s personal effects stored somewhere, he’d get them tomorrow or the next day.

“Hm? God, I have no idea what happened to any of my stuff. My apartment in Barcelona, I’m sure the landlord thinks I just disappeared. Probably put it all out for the trash, or sold it, or left it for the next renter to deal with.” Sandburg shook himself. “G-TAC, right. The other times they placed me out, they issued me some uniforms. You could talk to them about that, before you spend your money on me.”

Jim would really rather not. “You don’t need anything from them. I just meant, your own things. What happened to what you had with you when they picked you up at the airport?” Maybe one of those other Sentinels had kept it, or trashed it, or God knows what.

Blair frowned. “I really don’t know. I had a checked suitcase and a carry-on. Damn, I had a laptop computer that belongs to the University. I had to practically sign away my life when they lent me that thing. I wonder what happened to it?”

“I’ll see if I can track it down,” Jim promised. “They shouldn’t have thrown it all away—unless you left it behind in the airport?”

Blair thought. “No—no, I remember I had already gotten my suitcase from the baggage claim, and I had it—I think they took it along. I don’t know. If they say they left it in the airport, I’ll believe them, but I don’t think they did.”

“Okay. I figured I’d just get you some sweats and things like that for around the house this time. Before we have to worry about what you’re going to wear to work, we’ll have found out if you still have anything.”

“Yeah. I had a blazer and some good pants in there—I was going to present a paper.”

Now Jim had the image in his head of a serious young student, getting off an airplane thinking about the academic conference he was going to, the paper he was going to present—Jim wasn’t completely sure what that meant, but it sounded important—and suddenly finding himself trapped in the nightmare that the last year and a half of his life had been. 

G-TAC had a hell of a lot to answer for.

#

“Do you need to go to the bathroom before I leave, Chief?” Jim asked.

For a second, Simon thought Jim was talking to him. But Jim was looking down at Blair Sandburg when he said it, and he remembered that “Chief” was what Jim usually called kids whose names he didn’t know. Daryl, Simon recalled, had hated it. 

And while the Guide couldn’t really be a kid—he had to be at least eighteen or nineteen—he was a small guy, and the casts that completely covered both hands, except for his right thumb, made him look pretty pathetic and vulnerable. 

“Uh,” the Guide said. “I think I’m okay.”

“If you’re not sure, I’d you’d better go, just to be sure. I think Simon would rather not have to take you, you know?” Jim sounded completely serious about it, and while he was right, there was something funny about watching him act like a doting mother with a small child. “And I might be out for a couple of hours.”

“Yeah, okay, you’re right.”

To Simon’s surprise, Sandburg held out his arms, and Jim picked him up. Simon couldn’t see any casts or bandages on his legs—was the kid paralyzed?

He couldn’t be, Simon decided—there was no wheelchair, and a handicapped Guide wouldn’t be assigned to a police detective, anyway. He sat on the couch, noticing as he did that Jim’s apartment looked noticeably more lived-in than the previous times Simon had visited. Jim had nice things, but his place sometimes looked like a display setup in a furniture store, with nothing out of place. Now there was a blanket crumpled up on the sofa, as if someone—probably Sandburg—had been taking a nap there, and a pile of books on the coffee table, next to a used plate and fork. Not exactly bachelor squalor, but unusual for Jim. 

When Jim came back, he settled his Guide on the sofa, arranging a book on a pillow in his lap. “Simon, want a drink? Come in the kitchen and I’ll show you what we have.”

Simon knew from experience that Jim was unlikely to have a bewildering array of drink options, so Jim must want to get him into the other room to tell him something he didn’t want to say in front of the kid. 

When they got to the kitchen, Jim opened the refrigerator. “We have…beer, water, and orange juice. I could make coffee.”

“A beer’s fine.” Simon accepted one, and waited for Jim to say what he wanted to say.

“Look,” Jim finally said. “He was…mistreated. He’s kind of timid. No, he’s not. He’s scared, and pissed off, and confused, and bright as hell. Just--” Jim raised his hands in a gesture of exasperation.

Simon nodded. “I’ll go easy on him, Jim,” he said, wondering how a Guide had come to be “mistreated.” Was he saying that someone had broken the kid’s hands _deliberately_? How had whatever Sentinel he’d been with before Jim allowed that to happen?

He was just a kid; maybe he came from an abusive home, and G-TAC had decided to assign him to a Sentinel before he healed, just to make sure he stayed safe. Jim would be an ideal choice for an assignment like that—he was fiercely protective of abused kids and battered women, and Simon had never seen an abusive parent or a wife-beater who didn’t have the basic sense to be scared of Jim. 

“Thanks, Simon,” Jim was saying, heading back into the living room. “I’m sure you guys will be fine. Anything else you need before I leave, Chief?”

The Guide glanced up from his book. “I’m okay.”

Jim nodded. “I’ll be back soon.” He picked up a shopping list and glanced at it. “Oh—Simon, did you want to stay for dinner? I’m making steaks.”

Simon thought about it. Jim was a good cook with a few basic recipes, and steak was one of them. But he probably needed time to bond—if not Bond—with his new Guide. “Not today, Jim. I had a big lunch and I promised myself I’d eat something healthy for dinner.”

“Some other time, then.” Jim picked up his keys and stood with them in his hand. “I’ll just go, then.”

“See you,” Simon said.

Sandburg looked up again, an affectionate smile on his face that matched the one Jim wore whenever he looked at his Guide. “It’ll be fine, Jim.”

“I know. All right, I’m going.” 

Jim finally left, and Simon sat down on the couch with his beer. Jim had introduced him to Sandburg, but since then, the kid hadn’t said anything directly to him. “I know you don’t need a babysitter,” he said, thinking of how embarrassed his teenage son would be if Simon or his mother called another adult to stay with him when they went shopping, broken hands or not. “He can be overbearing. He’s a good guy, though. And a good cop.”

“I know,” Sandburg said. “Sir. Uh, Captain Banks. Sir.” 

“You don’t work for me yet, Sandburg, and I’m here as Jim’s friend today. You can call me Simon.”

Sandburg nodded like he was cataloging that away somewhere. “Okay. Thanks, Simon.” He turned back to his book.

“If you don’t need anything, I guess I’ll watch some TV—if that won’t bother you?”

The Guide raised one casted hand. “I’m fine. Go ahead.”

Simon watched a TV program and finished his beer, promptly taking the bottle into the kitchen to rinse and put in the recycling bin—he knew better than to leave a bottle sitting on the table in Jim’s house; the man practically alphabetically filed his trash. Helping himself to another beer, he looked in the cupboard to see if there were any pretzels or anything to wash down with it. 

No—Jim really had needed to go to the store. “Maybe you can tell me something, Sandburg,” he said, going back to the living room. “Was Jim blowing smoke up my ass with that thing about asking me to help watch you because I’m a ‘respected warrior’?” It was a good line, Simon had to admit.

The kid looked up, putting his book aside. “Well. When he left me alone for a few minutes yesterday, I got hurt again.” He stretched; it looked painful. “So he’s pretty freaked, doesn’t want to have me out of range of his senses. So he needed to leave me with someone he trusts on a deep, instinctive level.”

Simon had been a detective long enough to notice when someone wasn’t quite answering the question he’d asked—but in a way, what Sandburg was saying was even more of a compliment than how Jim had explained it. Simon wasn’t sure he’d say that Jim really trusted anyone.

Sandburg had been sitting with his legs curled up underneath him; now he shifted them out from under him and put his feet on the floor. Leaning forward slightly, he reached for the book and pillow, which he’d put on the coffee table.

Suddenly, he cried out in pain. “Shit! Oh, Christ.”

“Sandburg? What’s wrong?” Simon sat forward, wondering what he should do. Call an ambulance? Get Jim, somehow? 

“My feet. Jesus, that hurts.” He sat back, taking his weight off his feet, and drew one foot up onto his knee, so he could look at it—at the same time, giving Simon a look at it.

The sole of the kid’s foot was covered with a blister, oozing yellow pus. “What the hell happened there?”

“I broke my blister,” Sandburg said tightly. “Could you, uh, could you get me an old towel or something? I don’t want to get this crud on the rug.”

“Sure.” There were two towels hanging on the rail in the bathroom, but Simon thought it would be better to find a clean one. A little poking around led him to a linen closet next to the bathroom. Jim didn’t seem to have any old towels, just a large pile of identical fluffy white ones. Finally Simon chose one of those, and took it back to the living room.

It must have taken longer than he thought, because by the time he got back, Sandburg had taken matters into his own hands. He’d gotten his shirt off, somehow, and had wadded it up and was holding it to the sole of his foot.

That wasn’t, however, what made Simon stop and gasp. The kid’s body was covered with bruises and welts. _Covered_. Somebody had worked him over good. This was what Jim meant by “mistreated”? Hell, if someone had done that to Daryl, or his kid sister, or even his ex-wife—anyone he felt at all responsible for—he wouldn’t want to leave that person’s side either. 

Sandburg looked up, noticing the look of shock on Simon’s face. “Oh. Yeah, uh—sorry. Can you--” He took the wadded-up t-shirt away from his foot and motioned for Simon to replace it with the towel.

Simon did, sitting on the sofa next to the Guide and helping him wrap the towel around his foot, so he didn’t have to hold it. 

“The rest of this, it isn’t as bad as it looks,” Sandburg added. 

Simon realized he was _embarrassed_ , of all the damn things. Sandburg obviously didn’t do this to himself; he had nothing to be embarrassed about. If he let on how angry Sandburg’s condition made him, the poor kid would probably think Simon was mad at him. Striving to be matter-of-fact, he said, “Shouldn’t you have some bandages on that foot?” 

“The doctor said to let it air out. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to bandage it now that the blister’s broken, though. It probably says somewhere in the papers from the hospital—they’re under the books somewhere.”

Simon found the thick stack of hospital forms, and leafed through the pages, holding them were Sandburg could see them. 

“Not that page…not that one…there it is. ‘If blisters break, loosely cover with a sterile dressing and antibiotic ointment. Change bandages and reapply ointment two times daily.’ Okay.”

“Do you know where Jim keeps the bandages?” Simon asked, putting down the papers and standing up.

Sandburg shook his head. “No—the hospital sent us home with a bag full of stuff; there might be some in there. I think it’s in the kitchen.”

“I’ll start there, then check the bathroom,” Simon decided. “And I’ll put this in the hamper, and get you another shirt,” he added, picking up the old t-shirt.

“I don’t have any others, until Jim gets back from the store.”

“I’ll get you one of Jim’s.” Anything of Jim’s would be big on him, but better than nothing. And Simon was sure Sandburg didn’t want to sit half-naked, with his injuries showing, until Jim got back. “He won’t mind.”

“Okay.” 

By the time Simon had gathered everything he needed, Sandburg was breathing more easily. “Are you feeling okay?” While he knew he wasn’t responsible for Sandburg’s injury, he was a little worried about Jim coming home and finding his Guide in worse shape than when he’d left. 

Sandburg nodded. “Yeah. It hurt like hell for a minute there, but it’s not so bad now. I forgot I’m supposed to be staying off my feet.”

“It’s probably going to hurt when I put this on,” Simon admitted, opening a tube of ointment. 

“Maybe if you can get some of the stuff on my thumb, I can apply it,” Sandburg said. “It won’t hurt quite as much if I do it myself.”

That worked well enough—it was Sandburg’s right foot, so working on it with his left thumb was awkward, but after several minutes, he pronounced himself ready for the bandage. “See if you can find one that says non-stick,” he added, as Simon looked through the bag. 

It was a tricky spot to bandage—the wound was too big to cover with a band-aid, and Simon knew that a pad of gauze with medical tape wouldn’t stick long on a flexible body part like a foot. Eventually they settled on a non-stick gauze pad, with a longer strip of gauze wrapped around the foot to hold it on. Finally, he helped Sandburg put on an old, soft t-shirt he’d found in Jim’s dresser upstairs. 

“That should do it. Thanks, man. Uh, Simon.”

“You’re welcome.”

Sandburg settled back into the couch cushions, carefully drawing his legs up underneath him. He reached for his book, found he couldn’t reach it, and gave Simon a hopeful look. “Uh, would you mind--?”

“Not a bit.” He helped Sandburg get set up with his book again, then turned his attention back to the TV and the rest of his beer.

Or acted like he had, anyway. Scared, pissed off, and confused, Jim had said Sandburg was. He sure had reason to be. It was probably the best thing for him that he was a Guide—and Jim’s Guide in particular. He had a clear way out of whatever bad situation he’d come from, and Simon was sure Jim would make sure nothing like this ever happened to him again.

After a while, Simon noticed that while Sandburg had gone back to his book, he kept giving Simon anxious little glances, like he was expecting—something. “You know that none of what happened to you is your fault, right?” he asked gently. 

“Yeah. I know.”

He knew, Simon thought, but he didn’t really believe it. That would take time. “We have a pretty good victim-witness advocate down at the station, if you need somebody to talk to.”

“Thanks. It’s not really a police…thing.”

He hadn’t filed charges, Simon supposed. “That’s all right. You’re working with Jim; you’re part of the team.”

Sandburg looked at him for a moment. “Thanks. That’s—I’ll keep that in mind.”

“I think I have one of her cards,” Simon said, getting out his wallet and locating it. “Here. I’ll say something to her, so if you decide to call, she knows who you are.”

Simon decided not to try to get Sandburg to open up about the abuse—it didn’t seem like the kid wanted to talk, and anyway, Simon wasn’t trained to deal with that sort of thing, and he wasn’t Sandburg’s father, or his Sentinel. Sandburg was happy enough to talk about some lighter topics, and when Simon found a college basketball game on TV, he put aside his book to watch it along with him. 

By the time Jim got back, though, Simon was ready for some answers. It was clear that Sandburg was a nice kid who had been dealt a lousy hand of cards, and was playing them as best he knew how. If whoever had hurt him wasn’t currently sitting in jail, Simon wanted to know why not, and what he could do about it.

But the first thing Jim had to do, after he walked in the door, was check Sandburg over thoroughly. He noticed the new bandage on the Guide’s foot, so that had to be explained. “Simon—Captain Banks—got me one of your shirts, because mine was kind of gross. That’s okay, isn’t it?” the kid asked anxiously after Jim had given his approval of the bandaging job.

“Yeah, Chief, that’s fine. Thanks, Simon.” He briefly touched the Guide’s head. “Let me get the groceries put away, and then I’ll show you your new stuff.”

“I’ll give you a hand with that,” Simon offered, going over to the small mountain of plastic bags that Jim had brought in with him, and looking for the ones that had groceries in them. Once he and Jim were in the kitchen, he put down his share of the bags and said, “What’s his story, Jim?”

“What do you mean?” Jim took one of the bags and started putting things into the refrigerator. 

“Who did that to him? His parents?”

“No.” Jim didn’t elaborate.

“Another Sentinel?” That was almost unthinkable. 

Jim shut the freezer door a little harder than he really had to. “G-TAC.”

G-TAC? No—Jim had to be misunderstanding, or else he was. “Jim, somebody beat that kid like he was an animal—you’re telling me that was G-TAC?”

“Yeah, I am. And they had every right to do it.”

What? “You can’t be telling me you think it’s all right to treat somebody like that.” 

“No. No, I’m not saying it’s right, I’m saying they’re _allowed_ to do it. ‘In the vital interest of national security, any Sentinel or Guide may be compelled to service in the public interest, and cooperation with the requirements of service may be enforced by any means deemed necessary by the Sentinel Recruitment Board or the Guide Training and Assignment Center and/or parties authorized by same.’ It’s the _law_.” 

“They don’t do that to everyone who gets drafted.” Did they? 

“He successfully evaded the draft for six years. When they found him, he wasn’t didn’t feel much like cooperating, and they didn’t go out of their way to make it easy for him.” 

“There has to be something we can do about it,” Simon said. “The law isn’t meant to allow _that_. This must have been, someone acting over their authority, a trainer who got carried away.”

“If there was someone I could arrest for this, I’d have done it already. Sir.” Jim angrily shoved cereal boxes into another cupboard. “They knew about this at the highest levels. The only thing they think they did wrong was letting a Sentinel find out about it.” 

Simon didn’t know what to say. “It doesn’t happen often, though. He’s some kind of a special case?”

“The thing with his hands, that’s unusual, as far as I know. The rest of it, I’ve heard similar things from other Guides.” 

Simon certainly hadn’t. It was like he’d woken up in a different country than the one he’d fallen asleep in the night before. Or a different part of history. “That sounds like something out of slavery days.” That Sandburg happened to be white didn’t make that comparison any easier for a man of Simon’s background to swallow.

“Maybe that’s because it is. Like slavery.” Jim turned away from his unpacking to look at Simon. “I had my choice of the armed services because I signed up voluntarily. I volunteered because I knew that if I didn’t, I’d probably have to go anyway. When I left the Army, I had to get the permission of the draft board to do it. They could call me back any time they feel like it. I get paid, but I can’t say no. Once a Sentinel or a Guide gets drafted, the government basically owns us. We don’t talk about it, but that’s how it is.”

“You can’t be saying that if you were reactivated, and you refused to go, they’d—beat you?” It was incredible enough when they were talking about Sandburg, but Jim was a man he’d known and respected for years. 

“Probably they’d just throw me in jail. People are—intimidated, by Sentinels. It’s not really a good idea to push around someone who can hear your heartbeat from three blocks away and has been taught to kill. It’s worse for Guides.” He shook his head. “If they called me up, I’d go. If my country—my tribe—needed me, I’d want to go. But I’m damn lucky I feel that way, because it wouldn’t matter if I didn’t.” He turned back to the grocery bags. “I told you I didn’t like G-TAC.”

“I thought you meant they got on your nerves or something. The bureaucracy. I wouldn’t have made you go, if I’d known.” He felt filthy—complicit—just thinking about it.

“If you hadn’t, Sandburg would still be there.”

The tense set of Jim’s shoulders, and the sharp, angry movements he used to shelve the rest of the groceries signaled to Simon that Jim was in no mood for further discussion. But a moment later, Sandburg called out from the living room, “Jim?”

Jim instantly dropped what he was doing and hurried back to the living room. “Yeah, Chief? What’s wrong?”

“You’re upset,” the Guide said. 

“Yeah. It’s nothing you did, Chief.”

“Maybe I’d better get going,” Simon said quickly. It looked like Jim needed some time alone with his Guide. “Nice meeting you, Sandburg.”

“You too,” Sandburg said distractedly. “Jim--”

Simon grabbed his coat and let himself out. Earlier in the week, he had taped an action movie that he was looking forward to seeing, about a Special Ops unit led by a Sentinel, co-starring his sexy female Guide. He had planned on watching it tonight, but suddenly, he didn’t think he’d enjoy it as much as he’d expected to.

#

Jim woke at a small noise that, once awake, he couldn’t quite identify. He was already sleeping better, just from having his Guide in the room below his, not bothered by ordinary sounds from the neighboring apartments or from the street below. But something about this noise had attracted his attention.

He heard it again. A scrape of fabric against the floor, followed by a sharply indrawn breath. 

“Chief? Blair?”

“Jim?” He appeared at the top of the stairs; it looked like he’d been coming up them on his hands and knees.

“You shouldn’t have come up here,” Jim scolded. 

Sandburg shrank back. “Sorry, I, just, I….”

“I just meant you could have called, and I’d have come down,” he explained. “What do you need, Chief?”

“I, um.”

“Bathroom?” he guessed. 

“No. I just—wantedtobenearyou,” Sandburg admitted in a rush.

Oh. He should have thought of that—it was completely natural for a stressed Guide to be more comfortable near a Sentinel. “Come here, then,” he said, sliding over and patting the bed beside him.

“You sure? I could just sit here for a little while. I didn’t mean to bother you.”

“It’s fine. There’s plenty of room.”

Before it could occur to Jim that he probably ought to get out of bed and carry Sandburg the rest of the way, the Guide had covered the remaining distance and was burrowing up against his side. Jim settled the covers over both of them, and soon they were both asleep.

#

For the first time since coming to Jim’s house, Blair woke confused about where he was. It felt like he was on a bed, not the couch, but it wasn’t quite this bright in his room—then he realized that his Sentinel was sleeping just behind him, and remembered.

That was embarrassing. He had figured Jim wouldn’t mind too much if he crept up the stairs for a little comfort—not that any of his previous Sentinels would have allowed such a thing, or he would have wanted it—but he had hoped Jim wouldn’t find out about it. Still, Jim was holding on to him like Blair was his favorite teddy bear, so maybe Jim wouldn’t think any less of him for it. 

The way Jim had his arm around him put some pressure on his sore ribs, but it felt comforting, at the same time. Maybe they would sleep like this sometimes, when Jim had had a hard day at work or something, and they could comfort each other. He’d like that. 

He felt Jim stir against him. “Mm. Chief?”

“Yeah, Jim?”

“You okay, Chief?”

“Yeah.”

He felt Jim’s nose brush against the back of his neck. “Sorry—you smell good.”

“I do?” That was a new one for him.

“Yeah.” Jim ran his hand down Blair’s side. “We should get up.”

“Uh-huh.” It was time for his meds, and he kind of had to pee, but at the same time, he was pretty comfortable where he was. 

#

“I think you’d better have a shower, Chief,” Jim said as they were finishing up with breakfast. The back of his neck did smell pretty damn good, but his crotch and armpits were getting rank. 

“Yeah? That’d be good. How are we going to keep these dry?” he asked, holding up one of his casts.

“Plastic bags, I guess.” For the first time, Jim wished the loft had a bathtub. He’d never much liked the idea of soaking in a tub of his own dirt, so he’d had a deluxe, multi-jet shower installed instead. Normally he was glad he had it, but it was going to make it challenging to give Sandburg a bath without getting soaked himself. 

The easiest way, really, would be to strip them both down and get in the shower together, but that wasn’t going to happen. No, he’d give Sandburg his shower first, then take a shower himself and put on some dry clothes. That way it wouldn’t matter how wet he got. 

He still had to keep Blair off his feet, too, but one of the plastic chairs from the balcony should work. The kind of chairs he had would never fit in a regular shower stall or tub, but in his oversized shower, it wouldn’t be a problem.

It wasn’t until he had Sandburg undressed, with bags over his casts, seated in the chair, and rinsed that Jim realized that getting wet wasn’t the real thing he had to worry about. The next step was going to be soaping Sandburg down. Cleaning him up in the hospital hadn’t been quite as weird—it was a medical setting; the rules were different there. But in a few minutes, he was going to be touching another man’s penis—among other things—in his own home.

Stalling for time, he picked up the soap and washcloth. He wondered if Blair had had to bathe the disabled man in his personal attendant job. Probably; if the guy had needed someone to feed him, he wouldn’t be able to bathe himself, either. “How long does it take for _this_ to stop being weird?”

“Bout a week,” Blair admitted. 

Great. He’d have another five to seven weeks of giving Sandburg baths when it _wouldn’t_ be weird. 

“If you don’t want to do it, you could probably get a PA to come in every day or two,” Sandburg suggested. “There are agencies—the hospital might be able to refer someone.”

“No,” Jim said. The idea of someone else putting their hands all over his Guide was much worse than just doing it himself. “Okay.” He started with Sandburg’s shoulders. Plenty of things between the shoulders and the crotch. No hurry.

#

Freshly bathed, shaved, dressed in some of his new clothes, and settled on the couch, Blair reflected that it was probably a good thing his balls—not to mention everything else—were still too sore for him to really get aroused by anything. Jim wasn’t _exactly_ his type, but he was hot, and nice, and a Sentinel. Long before his casts came off, the rest of him was going to heal enough to make bath-times awkward. 

Maybe Jim wouldn’t mind. Even without a Bond, it was pretty normal for Sentinels to be aroused by Guides they worked with regularly, even if the Guide wasn’t the gender they were usually attracted to. And Sentinel-Guide pairs were excepted from the usual fraternization rules, as well as the military’s regs about sexual orientation. The only regulation was that sexual relationships had to be consensual on both sides—rape was just about the only behavior from a Sentinel that Guides were explicitly permitted to complain about. 

Fortunately, all three of his previous Sentinels had adhered to that rule, despite a few threats otherwise. Huh—if he found himself about to pop a woody in the shower, he could remember Williams, drunk off his ass and saying that if Blair didn’t stop trying to “turn him into a homo,” he’d “hate-fuck him to death.” 

Yeah, that was a libido killer.

#

“So what’s on the agenda for today?” Sandburg asked when Jim came down from his room after getting dressed. 

He was really coming out of his shell, Jim noticed. Not that he’d really been _in_ his shell for long; the kid was irrepressible. “Not much. I might call G-TAC about getting your stuff back, but I don’t think I can go down there yet without breaking heads.”

“No hurry. It’s probably gone, anyway.”

“You did say yesterday that you had more to say about your theories about primitive Guides,” Jim reminded him, hoping to get his Guide talking again. 

“You really want to hear more about that?” Sandburg asked, pleasantly surprised.

“Yeah, I really do.” Honestly, he’d have been willing to listen to the kid read the phone book, but he’d been turning yesterday’s talk over in his mind in his spare moments. He was used to having several open cases going at once to occupy his mind, so since he was off-duty, he had a lot of mental energy to spare.

“Okay.” Blair put his book aside and leaned forward with his arms on the pillow in his lap. 

“That question you asked—why we turned our backs, or whatever you said, on the abilities of primitive Guides? I don’t know if I’m right, but I have a couple of ideas.”

“Great! What did you come up with.”

“Right. The first one was what the mind control thing—I know you said that’s not how it works, but if people thought it did, or were afraid it did, they wouldn’t want Guides to know they could do it.” He’d thought of that one when he was talking to Simon yesterday. Sentinels had more respect than Guides because people were—to put it bluntly—afraid of them. Nobody was afraid of Guides anymore, but maybe they had been once.

“Okay,” Blair said encouragingly. “I mean, yeah, that’s one.”

“And the other one was that the things you were talking about yesterday are all pretty wishy-washy. Stuff you can’t measure the way you can a Sentinel’s senses, or that there could be some other explanation for. Scientists don’t like stuff they can’t measure, right? So maybe they’d just decide that if they couldn’t measure it, it didn’t exist.” It sounded a lot less clear now that he was trying to say it out loud, than it had in his head. “Am I even close?”

“Yeah—the trend I’m talking about was pretty well advanced by the time the Enlightenment came around, but it was the final nail in the coffin, so to speak. There were scientists who tried to prove the existence of Guide powers back then, but they were swimming against the current even then. If they had succeeded, it might have turned the tide, but they didn’t.”

“Okay—so what was the current?”

“Most people blame it on the Roman Empire and the Catholic church,” Sandburg explained. “Between 800 and 900 CE, they spread out across most of Europe, and to establish control, they had to replace the local chiefs or big men with representatives of Rome—or get the chiefs to swear obedience to Rome—and, more importantly for our purposes, they had to replace the leaders of the indigenous religions with their own priests.”

“And those were Guides,” Jim remembered from yesterday. 

“Exactly. There’s not a lot of documentation about what happened in 800 CE, but we do have a lot of records of what missionaries in more recent times do when they try to spread their word of God to a village that has never encountered Christianity. They paint the local holy man or wise woman as well-meaning but deluded. I mean, it’s still happening the exact same way today in some of the most remote parts of the world—they go in and say, oh, your Shaman tells the nature spirits to make your crops grow? That’s a nice story, but it’s really God who does that. So it’s a reasonable guess that it happened the same way the first time Christianity made its bid at becoming a global religion—only back then they did it with violence, if persuasion didn’t work. Since most of these cultures didn’t have reading or writing, all they had to do was prevent one generation of Guides from passing their knowledge to their apprentices, and it was gone forever.”

All Jim really knew about the Roman Empire came from being forced to read _Julius Caesar_ in ninth grade—and all he remembered from that was the Ides of March and “et tu, Brute?”—but the Chopec, with their holy man that he was really beginning to think must have been a Guide, had only the barest familiarity with Christianity; they knew it was the religion “down in the village,” but they didn’t have any use for it. Sandburg’s theory at least fit the evidence he knew about—except then he spotted a flaw. “If the Romans didn’t want the people they conquered to have Guides, why didn’t they care if they had Sentinels?”

“That’s a good question. One of the theories is that that the things Sentinels contributed to their tribes and villages were more immediately practical, and the Romans knew that would be a hard sell. Another one is that Sentinels weren’t as involved with the indigenous spirituality, so it wasn’t necessary to quash them. And there’s a third theory that they basically _did_ try to stamp out indigenous Sentinels too, but because Sentinel abilities aren’t as dependent on lore or mysteries that were passed from shaman to apprentice, the Sentinel side of things sprang back up on its own. That fits in with how Guides haven’t completely disappeared, but the only part of their traditional role that’s left is the one that doesn’t depend on any specialized lore.”

“That’s three theories, Chief,” Jim pointed out. “How do you figure out which one’s true?”

“Well, you can’t,” Sandburg admitted. “That’s one big difference between historical anthropology and police work, I guess—in anthropology you come up with theories that fit with as much of the evidence as possible, but you can almost never get it narrowed down to one suspect that you can prove really did it and the others didn’t. In this case, I think they were all in on it together, and they may have had some unknown accomplices.”

“So it’s all just theory.” He had been hoping, he realized, that Sandburg would be able to tie everything up in a nice, neat bow. 

“A theory, yeah, but that doesn’t mean it’s just a guess. There’s a lot of evidence for the repressive effects the Catholic church had on Sentinels and Guides in the middle ages, for example.”

“Didn’t they used to say that only men were Sentinels, and only women were Guides?” Jim asked, remembering something that one of the female OCS instructors had mentioned.

“Yeah—that was Augustine, Saint Augustine, they call him, who came up with that one. He came up with the idea in the 5th century CE, and the Catholic church swallowed it whole, along with a lot of other things he thought up. His attitudes about women definitely have a lot to do with how the early church saw Guides—the guy was a huge misogynist, and a bigger homophobe.” 

The way Sandburg talked, it sounded almost like the 5th-century saint was a personal, and disliked, acquaintance. Jim thought it was pretty funny. 

“Because of the sexual aspect of the Sentinel-Guide bond,” Sandburg continued, “he thought same-sex Bonds were blasphemous, and because he saw both Guides and women as essentially passive, the woman had to be the Guide. It’s kind of a chicken-and-egg thing—it’s not clear from his writings whether he decided all Guides had to be women first, and then that Guide talents were passive, or the other way around. Maybe he wasn’t sure either—he was kind of messed up in the head, especially about sex.”

That rang a bell with Jim. “Wasn’t he the one who flogged himself when he masturbated?”

“That’s the rumor, yeah. Like I said, he was messed up. And he’s another one of the accomplices, from before—by the time the Holy Roman Empire was really getting going, same sex bonds, male Guides, female Sentinels, and suggesting that Guides had any powers that were anything other than passive were all heresy. So when the Romans took over a place, if the Sentinel was a man, he might be okay, as long as he had a female Guide or recanted his male one. The Guides, though, were pretty much screwed—male Guides were pretty much always executed for heresy, and female Guides were only spared if they recanted. Either way they wouldn’t be passing any lore to anybody. There’s tons of documentation about that—the Romans kept good court records. Say, would you mind if I had something to drink?”

“Oh, sure.” 

Once Jim had gotten him some water, he went on, “Another thing that’s well-documented, is that from about the eleventh century—it might have been earlier, but the documentation starts there—girls who were identified as Guides were rounded up and put into nunneries. The accepted explanation for why they did that was that it allowed them to indirectly control Sentinels—they’d basically have to apply to the Church for permission to marry a Guide, and take the one that was picked out for them. That’s definitely part of it, but the system also let them ensure that none of the girls had any chance to learn any heretical Guide lore, if anyone still existed that could teach it to them. There are some well-documented witchcraft trials from the 9th and 10th centuries—trials of Guides who demonstrated, or claimed to have, powers traditionally attributed to Guides—that a lot of people consider evidence that some of the lore must have survived, maybe passed along in secret, until that time.”

“When did that stop?” Jim asked. “The nunneries, not the witchcraft.”

“You can still do it, if you’re Catholic and have a daughter who’s a Guide. But it became voluntary in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, depending on the country. About the same time that the Catholic church caught up with the newer branches of Christianity and declared that male Guides and female Sentinels existed again.” Sandburg reached toward the water glass; Jim lifted it to his mouth. Once he’d drunk, Sandburg added, “One of my classmates at grad school was writing her thesis claiming that Jeanne d’Arc must have been a Guide educated in the traditional Guide lore of eastern France, but I’m pretty sure she was full of it. My classmate, I mean, not Joan of Arc.”

“How come?”

“No evidence.” Sandburg shrugged. “I mean, there’s no evidence that it isn’t true, either, but there’s no evidence that she was a Guide—if she was, she probably would have been in a nunnery, and she wasn’t; the miracles associated with her don’t match up with any of what little we know about ancient Guide lore from that region; and she was tried for heresy, not witchcraft. It’s a _great_ story—I wish it was true, but there’s no sign that it was. I have some wild-ass theories of my own, but I don’t try to make them the centerpiece of my dissertation.”

The dissertation he was never going to have a chance to write. Before Sandburg had a chance to remember that, Jim said, “What kind of wild theories?”

“Uh….” Sandburg seemed to develop caution for the first time in the conversation. “All kinds of stuff. Probably the most outrageous one was where I said Jesus could have been a Guide.”

“Jesus,” Jim swore, then grinned. “You don’t start small, do you? I’d have thought you were Jewish, though.”

“So was he,” Blair pointed out. “Ethnically, yeah. I wasn’t raised Jewish. You can’t study human culture and leave out Christianity—it’s too important. And it’s more likely than not that Jesus existed as a historical figure. I’m on the fence about the ‘son of God’ angle—like the rest of the belief systems I study, I don’t believe in it, but I don’t disbelieve in it, either. What an anthropologist is interested in is what people believe, why they believe it, and what effects their belief has—not whether what they believe is true or not. I usually say that on the _first_ day of class,” he added, “otherwise I get people telling me I’m trying to convert them, or put down their religion.”

“I can see how that would be a problem,” Jim agreed. “Spain is a Catholic country, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Blair said. “In the survey courses, though, pretty much everybody gets their turn to be offended by something. We get two days to talk about our specialization areas, and the rest of the time it’s an assigned syllabus. By the time we get around to the Guide stuff, everyone is pretty used to the idea that the church gets blamed for everything, because it’s been the most powerful cultural force in the region for the last fifteen hundred years or so.” 

When they finished their conversation, Sandburg settled down for a nap until lunchtime. 

The next few days fell into a pattern, organized around Sandburg’s needs: showering and other hygiene in the morning, including changing his bandages and applying the various ointments that Temas had prescribed. Three meals and two substantial snacks each day, with napping, reading, and television filling the time in between. At least once every day, Jim found some excuse to get his Guide talking about anthropology or one of his other interests. It wasn’t hard to do—the kid seemed to know at least a little about just about everything, so just about anything could start his motor running—the TV news would cover how a candidate for mayor had called his opponent a “motherfucker” in front of what he didn’t realize was a live mike, and Sandburg would be off talking about the “trans-cultural universality of the incest taboo.” (“Most insults are culturally specific, Jim—you call someone a ‘goddamned lying bastard,’ and if his culture has no conception of damnation or illegitimacy, it won’t register. ‘Fucking liar’? Well, fucking’s a good thing, right? But you can translate ‘motherfucker’ literally into any language and even if the other guy’s language doesn’t have that expression—or didn’t before—you’ll get your point across. Well,” he’d added, “you might have to specify that it’s his _own_ mother he’s fucking.”)

Conscious that he was going to be expected back at work relatively soon, Jim also made an effort to get himself out of the apartment for some quick errand each day. That duty wasn’t nearly as pleasant for him as listening to Sandburg talk, but it was something he had to get himself used to. 

One evening he returned takeout Chinese to find Blair on his feet, a few steps from the couch. “What are you doing?” Jim asked, dropping the food and rushing to his side.

“Just going to the john,” Sandburg said. He was pale and breathing hard, balancing on his left foot with just the toes of his more-painful right foot on the floor. 

“I was coming right back,” Jim pointed out, moving to pick him up.

Sandburg didn’t loop his arm around Jim’s neck. “I can do it myself.”

“Yeah, but you don’t have to. Come on.” He put his arm across Sandburg’s shoulder, getting ready to lift the Guide into his arms, but Sandburg twisted away from him. 

“I can do it,” he repeated. To prove it, he took a quick step with his right foot, almost hopping to get his left one back under him as quickly as possible. Jim heard his heart rate spike from the pain. 

“Chief, let me help you. The doctor said to stay off your feet--”

“As much as I could, yeah. He didn’t say never take another step again ever.”

“It’s only been a couple of days,” Jim pointed out. “Don’t exaggerate. Once your feet are better, you can--”

“They’re better enough to do this.” Before Jim could stop him, he took a few more halting, painful steps.

Seeing the pain he was in was unbearable to Jim. He quickly covered the distance between them and got one arm under Blair’s shoulders and the other under his knees, lifting him.

But Sandburg was only barely small enough for Jim to carry if he cooperated, and he’d put on a few pounds over the last few days. When he struggled, Jim had to put him back down or risk dropping him. 

“ _Don’t_ ,” Blair growled, breathing hard. 

“I just don’t want you to hurt yourself, Chief,” Jim tried to explain.

“They’re my feet. I’ll hurt them if I want to.”

Now he was just being ridiculous. “Why the hell would you _want_ to?”

“Because.”

“ _Because_ isn’t a reason.”

“ _Because_ \--” Blair glared at him and breathed hard for a few moments. “Because,” he said, a little more calmly, “being _carried to the toilet_ is fucking humiliating, that’s why.”

Jim had gotten over his embarrassment about helping Blair in the bathroom days ago, but he hadn’t thought of it from Sandburg’s perspective. He was being a stubborn little prick, but he did have a point. It was a _stupid_ point, but the only person Sandburg was hurting was himself, and he had a right do that. “Fine,” he said, deflated. “Suit yourself.” 

“I will.”

“Good.”

“Good.”

Jim deliberately didn’t watch Blair’s slow, painful journey to the bathroom. He did listen, figuring that the kid would be too stubborn to ask for help if he couldn’t get his pants down and his dick aimed in the right direction, but he managed somehow, and even managed to flush. By the time he was inching back through the kitchen, their dinner had gotten cold. Jim just stepped past him, without comment, to put the food onto plates and microwave it. 

Taking the plates from the microwave to the table took him about thirty seconds, and Blair about five minutes. When he did finally sit down, he looked at Jim with a wary expression, as if wondering what the consequences were going to be for getting his own way. Jim just said, “What do you want to start with, Chief, the lo-mein?”

After Jim had cleared the table and put the dishes in the dishwasher, he looked back and forth between Sandburg and his usual spot on the sofa. “Chief?”

“Uh. Yeah. Maybe you could help me over to the couch?” Blair suggested. 

“Sure thing, Chief,” Jim said easily. He stood at Blair’s right side and helped him up onto his good foot, and supported him with one arm on his shoulders as he limped back to the sofa.

#

“How are you holding up, Chief?” Jim asked, glancing over at him.

“Fine.” They were on their way to the hospital for his follow-up appointment, the first time Blair had been out of Jim’s apartment since being taken there the week before. He was a little anxious—Jim could probably tell that from his heart rate and breathing—but he knew there was nothing to be scared of. Jim wouldn’t let anything happen to him.

Unlike the previous visit, where Blair vaguely recalled that Jim had left his truck in a loading zone in front of the ER doors, this time they had to park in the multi-level parking structure next to the hospital. “Do you want me to carry you, or go borrow a wheelchair?” Jim asked.

Walking, Blair noticed, as not among the options. While the subject remained a sore one between them, on this one, he had to agree. All he had to put on his feet was a pair of Jim’s bedroom slippers, much too big for him, and it was going to be a much longer walk than anything he’d done since his injury. “Wheelchair,” he finally decided. In a hospital, he’d be just one more patient in a wheelchair, but being carried along by his Sentinel would be extremely conspicuous. 

“Okay.” Jim leaned across him and pushed down the lock on the passenger door. “Lock this side behind me,” he said of his own door. “Be right back.”

By the time Jim had disappeared from sight, Blair was having second thoughts about his decision. Every time he heard another car approaching, he wondered if it might be someone from G-TAC, or one of his previous Sentinels. They were all in other nearby cities, and had no reason to be at Cascade General, but hey, he never said he was 100% rational. “Come on Jim,” he muttered. “How long does it take to find a wheelchair? Knock somebody over and steal theirs if you have to.”

When Jim finally did come back, Blair was almost as glad to see him as he’d been that day in the G-TAC cell. Well—maybe that was an exaggeration, but he was pretty damn glad to see him. 

“Sorry,” Jim said when he opened the door on Blair’s side. “They wanted to send a nurse along to help get you in the chair or something, and they couldn’t find one who was free. Finally I just grabbed the chair and left while they weren’t looking.”

“Cool.” He let Jim help him down into the wheelchair. Once he was sitting down, he held on to Jim’s arm for a few moments longer than necessary.

“Okay?” Jim said.

“Okay.” 

The elevator ride was scary, too. There were five or six other people in there with them, and Blair was uncomfortably aware that if one of them turned out to be dangerous, they were trapped in there with them. Maybe only for a few minutes—but a lot could happen in a few minutes. 

He felt better when they were out of the elevator and moving down the hall. There were even more people, but there were also several clear escape routes. 

When they found the right department of the hospital, Kas, the doctor’s Guide, met them in the waiting room. “How are you doing?” he asked Blair.

“Good,” Blair said. 

“He’s treating you all right?”

No need to specify who “he” was. “Yeah, he is.”

“All right, let’s get your height and weight.”

Blair managed to stand on the scale, putting most of his weight on his left foot. 

Kas noted down his measurements, saying, “Your foot’s still bothering you?”

“The right one, yeah.” His left foot felt nearly back to normal—the blisters on it had never popped and were now starting to peel naturally—but his right foot still hurt like hell. It seemed to get a little worse every time Jim changed the bandages, because it was still oozing and the bandages got stuck. 

“I’ll make sure Dr. Temas looks at it,” Kas said, showing them into an exam room.

“Where is he?” Blair wondered. Kas seemed to be working with more independence than he thought was usual for a Guide. 

“With one of his other patients. Doctors have bigger caseloads than nurses, so the way we do it is that I share his patients with two other nurses. I get the ones that he might need to use his senses with—and the ones we like.” Kas winked. “He’ll be in in a little bit. I’m going to start by taking your vitals and getting some x-rays.”

That was interesting. He’d assumed that Kas might have some medical training of his own, but that he just worked at Temas’s side, acting as a spare pair of hands when needed. But it sounded like Kas had his own job, sort of, in addition to being Temas’s Guide. 

Jim helped him onto the exam table, and Kas checked his blood pressure, pulse, and temperature. “Temp’s a little high, so there’s probably some kind of infection. I should get a blood sample—we might want to change your antibiotic.”

“Okay.” He held out his arm, and Jim pushed up his sleeve.

After swiping his arm with an alcohol pad, Kas warned, “This is going to pinch.”

He looked away when the needle went in. He always hated having blood drawn—in his opinion, “pinch” was too mild a word; it _hurt_. But he reminded himself that it would be over in less than a minute, and counted down from sixty to keep himself grounded.

By the time he got to twenty, Kas was taking the needle out and putting a band-aid over the puncture. “Good.” He labeled the vial and wheeled over an x-ray machine. “Put your hand on the plate here; we’ll start with the right.”

When he put his hand on the machine, Kas steadied him with a hand on his forearm, just below the case. Involuntarily, Blair jerked back, pulling his arm up against his body. 

Shit. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Kas said gently.

“I’m being stupid. I know x-rays don’t hurt.”

“Take your time,” Jim said, moving a little closer to him. 

Blair shifted a little so that his shoulder was just barely touching Jim’s side. That was better. He gave Kas his hand again. 

“That’s good. Now turn your hand palm-up.”

Kas took four views of each hand before rolling the machine away. “Last thing we need is a urine sample,” he said, handing Jim a sample container. “The bathroom’s through there; you can leave the sample on the back of the toilet. I’ll be back with Dr. Temas shortly.”

“This is going to be fun,” Jim said, reading the instructions on the side of the container. 

Over the last few days, Blair had managed to achieve near-independence when it came to the bathroom, but the collection process was a little too complicated for a guy with only one working digit. Jim had to first clean the tip of his penis with an antiseptic wipe—“It says _thoroughly_ , Chief, so hold your horses”—and then hold the container while he pissed. 

He thought, not for the first time, how much worse it would be to be without the use of his hands if he was still at G-TAC. Even if they had set his hands and given him something to control the pain, they’d probably make him beg for the help he required with his most basic needs. Jim was comfortingly matter-of-fact about everything, and that made a big difference.

Not long after Jim had him settled on the exam table again, Kas and Dr. Temas came in. Blair was once again surprised by how different Temas seemed from the other Sentinels he met. It wasn’t really his size—Sentinels came in all shapes and sizes, although ones that looked like Jim were certainly the first that sprang to mind. But Sentinels seemed to carry themselves with a kind of overt authority, even the ones he’d met in non-industrialized societies. Even naked and weaponless, it would be hard to mistake a Sentinel for anything but a warrior—even if she happened, to be, say, a petite woman. 

Angel Temas, on the other hand, gave off an impression of calm competence. It wasn’t that he was unauthoritative, or submissive, but he didn’t have that feeling around him of being on the alert for danger and spoiling for a fight. He was a puzzle; Blair wished he could study him.

After a few questions about how he was doing, Temas went into the bathroom and picked up the urine sample. When he came back with it, he stood next to Kas, positioning himself in a deliberate way that was clearly a signal to his Guide. 

Kas put his hand on the back of Temas’s neck, and Temas held up the sample container, studying it.

Fascinating. That was clearly how the Bonded pair established a working link, allowing the Sentinel to focus on one sense—sight, in this case—without zoning. Physical contact was nearly always used to create a working link—the only exceptions Blair had seen were pairs where the Guide was also a shaman of some kind—but the contact was usually initiated by the Sentinel. And exposing the nape of one’s neck was a sign of submission in nearly all cultures. Sometimes a pair would link with the _Sentinel’s_ hand on the Guide’s neck, but he’d never seen the other way around. 

The other pair clearly didn’t see anything unusual in it, though, and after a moment they broke contact. “I don’t see any signs of blood or other abnormal proteins,” Temas said, “and the concentration looks within the normal range. I’ll send it down to the lab to be sure, but it looks like your kidney function is fine.”

“You can see that?” Blair asked, surprised. “You have to be looking on a microscopic level.”

He probably shouldn’t have said anything, but Temas didn’t seem to mind. “Uh-huh,” he said.

“He’s very good,” Kas added. 

“A little above average, maybe,” Temas disagreed. “Most Sentinels train themselves to expand the range of their senses over distance; I went the other way and worked for precision at close range. Probably a lot of us could do it if we wanted to.” He put the sample down on a counter. “Okay, do you want to start at the top or the bottom? Your feet or your tongue?”

Blair looked at Jim for guidance, but Jim just shrugged. “Feet, I guess,” he decided.

Jim started removing his socks. “He’s been walking on them,” Jim said, his tone clearly disapproving. “I told him not to, but he does anyway.”

“Just a little,” Blair said. “In the house.”

“It would be pretty hard to stay off them entirely,” Temas agreed, squatting to take a look at Blair’s left foot. “This one looks like it’s healing up nicely, though. Does this hurt?” he asked, pressing lightly at a blister.

“Tiny bit,” Blair admitted. 

“Keep using the ointment on that one for another day or two,” Temas said, “but that looks good. I take it the other one is the one we have to watch.”

“Yeah,” Blair said. “I popped the blisters on that one—by accident. It’s pretty gross.”

“I can see that. Kas, could you--”

Kas filled a basin with warm water and passed it to Temas. 

“Hold your foot in that for a minute; the bandages’ll come off easier.”

It worked; after he’d soaked his foot in the warm water for a minute or two, the bandages practically fell off. “Why didn’t we think of that?” Jim wondered.

“Yeah, really,” Blair said. They’d been painstakingly peeling off the bandages before he showered every morning; if he’d just gone into the shower with them on, they probably would have come off without any trouble.

“Oh, I forgot to put that in the instructions,” Temas said. “Sorry, I had other things on my mind.”

Right, Blair thought privately, the discharge instructions hadn’t been long _enough_. “No problem.”

“Okay,” Temas said, examining his other foot. “This is really nasty—what happens, when you break the blister over a burn like this, is that you create the perfect setup for infection, and that’s what you have here. Kas?” He bent his head again, and Kas rested his hand on his neck. When he raised his head, Kas took his hand away. “The infection is still pretty superficial—it’s affecting the inner layer of the skin, but not any of the tissues beneath it. I’m going to give you a stronger oral antibiotic, and also something to soak the foot in. It’s a powder; mix it with water and soak for about ten or fifteen minutes, twice a day. You can do it when you change the bandages.”

“And he should stay off it, right?” Jim asked, with a pointed look in Blair’s direction.

Temas pushed himself to his feet with his hands on his thighs. “I would,” he said. “Because putting weight on that foot is going to hurt like a motherfucker. But walking a little bit, on a level, clean surface, isn’t going to slow the healing process or make the infection any worse. _Don’t_ put a shoe on that until it’s completely stopped oozing—when you put shoes on, you create a warm, moist environment that’s perfect for bacteria.”

Blair gave Jim a pointed look of his own. _See_?

“Normally I’d give you crutches, so you could get around on your own and stay off that foot, but with your hands the way they are, there’s no point.”

Blair thought about that. He wouldn’t be able to pick up crutches on his own, but if Jim got him set up with them, he could hook his casted left thumb over the handgrip on that side—and on the right, he’d be in better shape since he could actually hold on a little. That might be a way to make them both happy—he’d still need a lot of help, but he’d be standing on his own instead of being carried. He looked down at his hands, trying to see if it would work.

“No,” Temas said. “Even with the casts on, trying to put weight on your hands could displace the fractures again. Not a good idea at all, even if it there might be some way you could manage it.”

Blair looked at him with surprise, wondering how Temas knew what he was thinking.

“Believe it or not, you’re not the first patient I’ve had to deal with who didn’t want to give his body the time it needs to heal,” Temas said dryly. “I can read you like a book, kid. You are not going to be chasing your Sentinel around any crime scenes until you’re back on your feet.” He gave Jim a challenging look.

“He sure isn’t,” Jim agreed. “If you really want to hurt yourself walking to the bathroom, Chief, I can’t stop you, but that’s the limit.”

“Any other injuries I should look at?” Temas asked. 

“I think they’re all healing okay,” Blair said. “My back’s still kind of ugly, but I don’t think it’s infected or anything.”

“Mind if I look for myself?”

“Go ahead.”

Jim helped him take his shirt off, and Temas walked around him, looking closely at his back and shoulders. “This puffy redness here and here--” he pointed them out, his fingers brushing Blair’s skin too lightly to really hurt, “—that is infection, but it’s very mild. Be extra-careful about using the antibiotic cream on those,” he added to Jim. “Are you running out of that?”

“We ran out yesterday,” Jim admitted. “I got some other stuff from the drugstore.”

“I’ll get you some more of ours—it’s the same thing, really, but a little stronger.” Once Blair had his shirt back on, Temas had him open his mouth so he could examine his tongue. “These stitches are ready to come out, and you can discontinue the mouth rinse after today and tomorrow. You have enough of that left?”

“Yes,” Jim said. 

“Good.” Temas accepted a pair of scissors from Kas, but when he got them close to Blair’s mouth, Blair pulled away. 

“Why don’t you close your eyes, Chief?” Jim suggested, putting a comforting hand on his shoulder.

That helped. It was still a little nerve-wracking, but once he couldn’t _see_ the sharp object being poked at his tongue, he was able to hold still. 

When he opened his eyes again, Temas was handing Kas the scissors and a pan with the two stitches he’d just removed, sitting in it like little black spiders. Blair ran his tongue around in his mouth, experimentally. “Feels a lot better.” The stitches had pulled at his tongue when he moved it to talk to eat—not really painful after the first day or two, but weird.

“Good. Tongues heal fast; it looks fine. All right, hands.” He clapped his own together. “Kas, what’s the ETA on the x-rays?”

“Years,” Kas said. “Lab’s backed up.”

“Of course it is.”

“They said they’d try to have them by the end of the day; if not, they promised the night shift will get to them.”

“Unless the night shift has something better to do. Okay. So how are they feeling?” he asked Blair. “Any unusual pain or swelling?”

“Well, they hurt,” Blair said. “I’m not sure what’s unusual—this has never happened to me before.”

The answer was a little more smart-alecky than was probably wise, but Temas didn’t seem to mind much. “Right. Well, if they seemed to be getting better but then suddenly got worse, that would be unusual.”

Oh. “No, nothing like that. When I stopped taking the Vicodin during the day, they felt worse, but I don’t think they _were_ worse, if you know what I mean.”

“Yeah.” Temas nodded. “And swelling? You wouldn’t be able to see it, except on your right thumb, maybe, but have you noticed it feeling like the casts are tighter?”

“No.”

“I’ll give you a call tomorrow, when I’ve seen the x-rays and your lab results, but it sounds like they’re doing fine.” He glanced at his watch, then pulled up a chair. “How are you two doing, otherwise? It looks like you’ve had a busy week.”

“Good,” Jim said. “It’s been…good.”

“Good,” Blair agreed. Busy? Not exactly, but certainly interesting.

“Settling in with a new Guide—or a new Sentinel—can be tough in the best of circumstances, and these definitely aren’t the best circumstances,” Temas said. “If you have any problems, don’t hesitate to let us know. Right, Kas?”

“Right.”

“Okay. Let’s meet again next week, just so we can make sure everything’s coming along the way it should. I’m really happy for you guys.”

#

“Jim Ellison,” he said into the phone. “It’s about my Guide, Blair Sandburg.”

“Of course,” Lorelei Marks said. “Are you running into problems with him? That’s not unexpected, you know. As I said, we hadn’t completed his training.”

“No,” Jim growled. “No problems.” He had decided to wait to call G-TAC until he was back at work, since he thought the call was going to get heated, and he didn’t want his strong emotions upsetting his Guide.

“I’m very glad to hear that,” Lorelei enthused. “What can I help you with?”

“His personal effects,” Jim explained. “The things he had with him when he was picked up. Any idea what happened to them?”

“Oh.” Jim heard a clatter of keys on the other end of the phone. “Normally any belongings that he had at intake would have been sent with him to his first placement—you are aware that you aren’t his first placement?”

“Yes.”

“He was returned with nothing except his G-TAC issued uniforms when his first placement was disrupted,” Lorelei reported.

“He hasn’t seen any of his things since he was picked up,” Jim answered. “They weren’t sent to the placement with him.”

“Is that what he says?”

“It’s what happened.”

“He’s not always _entirely_ truthful,” Lorelei said.

“My Guide isn’t a liar.”

“Well, I’m not seeing any record of any personal effects.”

“Then keep looking. If his personal effects were lost or destroyed, that’s theft, and I will find someone to charge with it, starting with you.”

#

Jim Ellison abruptly ended the call, and Lorelei replaced her own receiver with a feeling of satisfaction. She hadn’t had any feedback on the progress of her plan in almost two weeks, since Ellison returned the paperwork. But it definitely seemed to be working—Ellison was still feeling protective of the Guide, and she expected that her delicate questions about his honesty would either plant doubts in the Sentinel’s mind, or make the Sentinel feel even more threatened, driving them closer together.

If she was _really_ lucky, Ellison would close ranks with Sandburg against her and G-TAC, but would _also_ start having doubts about how truthful Sandburg really was. Their relationship would be well-defended, but brittle, making it easy to play them against each other. Both would be ideal, but either alone would also suit her purposes.

That was the key to tactics--to plan so that every possible outcome of an action would suit her purposes. 

#

Hanging up the phone, Jim went to the break room for a cup of coffee, as an excuse to get up from his desk and clear his head. Two more hours until his lunch break, when he could go home and check that Blair was all right. He hoped the kid wouldn’t need anything until then. Before leaving, Jim had set him up on the couch with his books, the remote, and a sports bottle of water, which Blair had proven he could just manage to clamp between his casts and drink from if he was really thirsty. He hoped he wasn’t forgetting anything important. 

“Hey Jim,” Detective Brown said as he came up beside Jim and reached for his own coffee cup.

“Hi.”

“I heard you got a Guide of your own, finally,” Brown said. 

“Yeah, I did,” Jim said. 

“That’s great, man. When do we get to meet him? Her?”

“He’s on sick leave right now. It’ll be a few weeks before he can come in to work.”

“Weeks? He must be really sick.”

“Yeah.” Talking about Blair was just making him want to go back to check on him even more than he had before. “Nice talking to you, H, I’ll see you later.”

His escape proved to be only temporary. He had only been back at his desk for a short time before Simon called him into his office to ask how “the kid” was doing.

“He’s fine,” Jim said. “The doctor says he’s recovering as well as can be expected.”

“That’s good to hear. He seems like a nice kid. And you’re okay with leaving him alone now?”

“Yes,” Jim lied. “Okay” was too strong a word, but he could handle it. 

“Good. Tell him I said hi.”

“I will.”

#

Blair had been taking a nap, but startled awake when he heard the sound of a key in the lock. _Jim_ , he told himself, while his heart raced. He knew it was Jim, but he couldn’t really calm down until the door opened enough to reveal that it was, in fact, Jim. 

Now Jim was going to think he’d been scared the whole time he was gone. “Hey,” Blair said casually. 

“Hey, Chief,” Jim said. “You okay?”

“Yeah. You?”

“Good.”

“Work okay?”

“Yeah. It’s, you know, work. Sandwiches okay?”

“Sure.”

Blair made his way over to the kitchen table while Jim made their lunch. Walking was getting easier every day, as long as he took it slow. Jim still didn’t like it, but they hadn’t argued about the issue in days. It was a really good sign, that Jim could live with him making decisions Jim didn’t like. 

“Simon says hi, by the way,” Jim said as he brought the sandwiches over. “Coke?”

“Okay. Hey,” he asked when Jim came back with their drinks, “how long until I can start going in to work with you?” Even with the books to read, being stuck in the apartment all day was getting boring. The pretense that he was doing extended fieldwork about American Sentinels, too, would be easier to maintain if he could actually observe the Sentinel in question at work.

“When your casts come off, Chief,” Jim answered.

“What? But that’s another month, could be a month and a half!” He had figured that once he was walking—maybe next week--he’d be able to tag along with Jim, even if he wouldn’t be much use.

“Uh-huh.” Jim held his sandwich out to him. 

Blair took a bite. What could he say to Jim that would change his mind? “I could come in, maybe half days or something to start.”

“When your casts come off, yeah. Chew with your mouth closed.”

“Sorry.” He waited until he’d swallowed his next bite to speak again. “I’m feeling a lot better,” he suggested. “I mean, I don’t need to sleep half the day anymore.”

“That’s good. That gives you lots of time to catch up on your reading. I’ll take you to the bookstore this weekend, and get you some new stuff.”

“Really? That’d be great.” He wondered what bookstore Jim had in mind, and if he might consider the University bookstore instead. Well, even if he went to the chain store at the mall, he’d be able to find something good. They wouldn’t have anything he wanted about anthropology, but he liked to read popular books about other fields, too. Happily thinking about what he might like to read next, he was almost done with lunch before he realized that Jim had successfully distracted him from the topic at hand. He decided to say directly, “I’m looking forward to going in to work with you,” thinking that maybe Jim was trying to be reassuring. 

“I don’t want you hanging around a police station, Chief. There’s criminals there.”

Was he even _listening_ to himself? “Jim,” Blair said. 

“What?” Jim asked.

“How do you see that working out? With you being a cop, and me being your Guide?”

“I don’t.” He shrugged. “I’m just putting it off. Are you done with that, or do you want some chips?”

“Okay, I’ll have some chips. Jim, it’s a police station. Full of cops. How unsafe is it going to be?”

“Cops, and _criminals_ ,” Jim said, coming back to the table with a bag of chips.

Appealing to reason was the wrong strategy, Blair decided. The problem was his protective instincts, so logic didn’t really enter into it. “But you’ll be there,” he pointed out.

Jim glared at him, dropping a handful of chips on his plate. “Nice try.” He held up a chip for Blair to eat. “I don’t like leaving you here alone, I don’t like taking you into a place where you might be in danger—I’ll work through it, but just give it a rest for now, okay?”

When he put it like that… “Okay,” he agreed. He knew Jim wouldn’t be letting him go to work _this_ week, and he wasn’t quite up to it yet anyway. He could let it drop for a few days. 

“Thanks, Chief.”

At his next doctor’s appointment, Dr. Temas pronounced the infection in his foot just about cleared up. At the end of the appointment, Blair had a great idea. Temas had taken his side about the issue of walking on his bad foot, so when Temas asked if they had anything else they wanted to talk about, Blair said, “Maybe you can tell Jim I’m well enough to start going to work with him.”

“Chief!” Jim protested.

“You mean you haven’t been?” Kes asked.

“No,” Jim said. “I don’t want him working until he’s better.”

“He’s as better as he’s going to be for a while,” Temas pointed out. 

“Right, so he can keep on staying home for a while.”

“You can’t like being away from your Guide all day,” Kas said.

“I’ve been working without a Guide for a long time; I can keep doing it a little longer.” Jim looked over at him. “Chief, I said drop it.”

He’d said _for a little while_ , and it had been two days. “I did.”

Kas spoke up. “It’s better for him—better for both of you—the more time you spend together.”

“He is well enough,” Temas said. “And you can’t keep him trapped in the house forever.”

“Thanks a lot,” Jim said sarcastically, and Blair could tell he was really angry. “Getting them to gang up on me, that’s great. That’s really how I want my Guide to act.”

Blair realized that control of the situation was slipping through his fingers. “I didn’t _get them to gang up on you_ ; I asked their opinion.” That came out sounding more defensive and less placating than he’d planned. 

“I don’t care about their opinion! You’re my Guide; it’s my call!”

“What, I don’t get a say?”

“About this? No, you don’t get a say!”

“You’re being completely unreasonable!”

“And you’re being an ungrateful little prick!”

“Oh, now I’m supposed to be grateful? What for, that you aren’t beating the crap out of me every time I turn around? Sorry, I didn’t realize you wanted a medal for acting like a goddamn human being!”

“Would it kill you to show a little respect for how _I_ feel? I mean, seriously, Sandburg, would that be so fucking hard?”

“The way you feel is stupid and wrong!” As the words were coming out of his mouth, he realized that his mother, the most peaceful woman he knew, would slap the curl out of his hair if she heard him say something like that—let alone Jim, who, throughout the whole screaming match, had been up in his face, but kept his hands at his sides. He forced down the next thing he had been about to say, and they glared at each other, both breathing hard. Finally Blair broke eye contact. “Sorry.”

Jim looked away, too. “Sorry, Chief, I—sorry.”

“I think Blair and me should take a walk,” Kas announced. “Go over some things Guide-to-Guide.”

“That sounds like a good idea,” Temas said. “Jim?”

“Yeah—yeah, okay.”

“Blair?”

“Okay,” he agreed. He wasn’t sure whether Kas wanted to protect him from Jim—something he was surer than ever he didn’t need—or to ream him out for disrespecting his Sentinel in public, but whatever it was, it seemed like putting a little distance between himself and Jim for a little while might be a good idea.

Kas took him down to the cafeteria on the ground floor of the building, and bought him a Coke—with a straw, so he could drink it by himself by ducking his head down to it. They should get some straws for the house.

“You guys fight like that often?” Kas finally asked.

Blair shook his head. “First time.” They had argued a little before, but hadn’t gotten nearly so out of control.

“Good. That’s really good.” Kas took a sip of his own drink. “You can’t live with somebody else without fighting from time to time, but when you’re a Sentinel and a Guide—especially when you’re Bonded—your feelings and his, they kind of feed off of each other. That can be great,” he added, “when you’re feeling good, but when you’re righteously pissed off at each other and neither of you wants to bend, it can get out of hand fast.”

Kas wasn’t saying anything that was news to him, but he had forgotten all of that in the heat of the argument. “Yeah, I was—out of hand about covers it.”

“That wasn’t too bad,” Kas said. “You both said some things that hit below the belt, but neither of you took a swing at each other—which is good, because then I’d have had to get between your Sentinel and mine, and that would have been something to see.”

“Jim wouldn’t hit me,” Blair said.

“Maybe not. Ang tried, a few times, in the early days. Of course, he knows damn well that I can take him; that makes a difference.”

That was hard to imagine. “What did you _do_?”

“Pinned him until he settled down.” Kas grinned. “Not something I’d recommend—it took a long time, since that pissed him off even more.”

“What do you recommend?” Growing up in communes and group housing situations, he knew a lot of methods for peaceful conflict resolution, but he had a feeling Jim wouldn’t be a huge fan of any of them. 

“First thing is, one of you has to step back and recognize what’s going on. Since you’re the Guide, that’s probably going to fall to you. Our whole job is to help them control themselves, after all.”

“Right.” That was something Blair could have thought of.

“Then the best thing to do in the moment is to get some distance between you and him, if that’s possible in the circumstances. You probably can’t get far enough away in the same house, so that means one of you take a walk, go for a drive, something like that. Like we did just now. Since he’s so protective right now, you’d probably want to tell _him_ to go take a walk—Ang’ll be telling him all this stuff right now, so he should get what you’re trying to do.”

Blair nodded. That was good to know.

“If you’re in a situation where you can’t get away from each other physically, the next best thing is to agree to shut up and ignore each other for ten minutes. Physical distance helps a _lot_ , but even if you’re still picking up on each other’s emotions, if it’s not coming out of your mouth, you can eventually get settled down. If you can, while you’re cooling down, try to focus on why you put up with the bastard in the first place.”

That did sound like one of the methods he remembered from growing up. At the commune in New Mexico, the rule had been that before you disagreed with someone, you had to say something you really liked about that person. It had been frustrating as hell when the person he “disagreed” with was a three-year-old who grabbed his books and drew on them with crayons—there wasn’t a damn thing he liked about her—but there were plenty of things he liked about Jim.

“Once you’ve both calmed down, reconnect. We usually link up, or have sex, or just cuddle for a little while. Don’t rush into that part, though—if you aren’t back in control, you can end up just starting back up again.”

The only one of those things he and Jim had _ever_ done was cuddle, that one time that he went up to Jim’s room to sleep. Still, he filed those ideas away for future reference. 

“And then you have to figure out some solution to whatever you were fighting about. That’s usually a lot easier once you’ve gotten all the anger out of your system. This thing you’re fighting about now—it’s kind of a tough one, because you’re both right. You ought to be at work with him, but it’s a dangerous job, and it’s understandable that he doesn’t want you doing it right now—and it’s not going to kill you to wait.”

“I don’t know, I might die of boredom in six weeks,” Blair said. 

“You won’t, and it won’t be that long. Anyway—I take it you talked about it before, and you agreed to drop it?”

“Yeah.”

“Then bringing it up with us was kind of a dick move. It’s not a mortal sin—and we did tell you to talk to us if you had any problems—but I can see why Jim didn’t like it.”

“Yeah.” He sighed. “Yeah, so can I.”

“And I don’t appreciate you dragging Ang into it much, either. Don’t get me wrong—he will stick up for you if Jim’s out of line, but that’s really not a can of worms you want to open for bullshit like this.”

“Yeah. Yeah, okay. Sorry.”

Kas moved on. “Now—a lot of Guides, they figure the best thing to do is never disagree with their Sentinels about anything. The Sentinels tend to like it better that way too, but the problem is, you can’t just bite your tongue--” Kas winced. “Sorry, bad choice of metaphor. You can’t just stuff everything down forever, and then you end up fighting about it. Try to talk things through _before_ you get to the point you just can’t stand it anymore.”

“I used to be really good at that,” Blair said. “I have kind of a short fuse, lately.”

“Stuff like you’ve been through can mess up your feelings and reactions. When Ang was in med school, we did a rotation working with PTSD patients at Walter Reed—now that was combat stress, mostly, and it’s more acceptable to have trouble holding on to your temper when you’re a combat veteran. If you’ve been abused, or whatever, people think you ought to curl up and cry, but getting angry, even about things that don’t have anything to do with the abuse, is just as normal.”

“Yeah. I’m—scared, a lot, and I guess being angry is better. Or at least different.”

#

 

“You want to tell me what the fuck that was about?”

Jim had found his way to a chair, and was sitting with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. “I don’t know,” he said to the floor. “I just lost it with him.”

“Yeah.” Temas blew out a breath. “You do that often?”

“No. Never. I’d never hurt him, Doc,” he added. “He just…he’s a stubborn little bastard, and I’m a stubborn—big bastard. Do you think he’s okay? I bet I scared him.”

“Probably,” Temas agreed. “In the short term, at least. G-TAC—if you talked to them--”

“Not going to happen.”

“No, I wasn’t suggesting it. They’d probably say he’s testing you to see what he can get away with. I think he is testing you—maybe not consciously—but he needs to know if he can make you mad without getting hurt. It’s not possible for two people to share their lives and always get along perfectly, even if one of them is a Guide.”

“I know. I hope he doesn’t think I think that.”

“In a way, it might even be a good sign he feels safe enough to stand up to you—it’s only been two weeks.”

Jim wished he could believe that, but, “He was standing up to the G-TAC trainer who beat the shit out of him two weeks ago, too. Hell, that’s one of the things I admire about him.”

Temas nodded. “It’s not the same, though. He likes you. It’s hard to stand up to somebody if you’re afraid they’ll stop loving you. Doesn’t seem like he’s too worried about that.”

“I do love the little punk,” Jim admitted.

“Of course you do; he’s your Guide.”

#

“Jim, come in here a minute—we need you at a crime scene,” Simon called from his office.

In a way, he was glad to hear it. He’d been riding a desk since he’d come back from his leave, and it was getting old fast. 

After offering him a cup of coffee, Simon got down to business. “It’s a bad one—a woman, looks to have been strangled, a few yards off a hiking trail in that park by the waterfront. With the weather we’ve been having, the body went undiscovered for at least two or three weeks.”

“Christ.”

“So the scene’s cold, and it’s been disrupted by animals, the weather, all kinds of things. Forensics doesn’t have a place to start.”

It sounded bad; Jim could understand why they wanted a Sentinel on it. “Is the body still in situ?”

“Yes—the ME is on her way, but if left order with the uniforms securing the scene that she’s not to touch it until you’ve examined it. You’ll need a Guide.”

“I’ll get one from dispatch,” Jim said. He and Sandburg had agreed on a one-week moratorium on the topic of him coming in to work, to give Jim more time to get used to the idea. It wasn’t up yet, and anyway, a gruesome crime scene was not what Jim had in mind for his first day on the job.

Simon nodded. “Your choice, Jim.”

Jim stopped by his desk long enough to call dispatch and request a Guide. 

“I can give you Melissa or Sam,” the dispatch secretary said. “Tim’s not available.”

Tim was the Guide he usually asked for, but he had worked with both of the others. “Sam,” he decided. Melissa was good, but she had a hard time with the difficult crime scenes. “Have him meet me at the crime scene,” Jim added. “We have the ME waiting for us to be finished.” He gave the location, then headed to his truck.

It was raining, a steady, icy drizzle; as Jim pulled into the parking lot at the park, he wondered what anyone had been doing hiking on a day like this. 

He parked next to a blue Ford sedan with a woman behind the wheel. When he got out of his truck, she rolled down her window. “Detective Ellison?”

“Dr. Ling,” he said, recognizing the ME. 

“It’s a bad one—that’s why I came down here to wait until it’s my turn with the body.”

Jim nodded. He could already smell the sickly odor of rotting flesh from here. At closer range, the smell would be oppressive, even for someone with normal senses. “I’ll try to be quick.”

“I’m not in any hurry,” she assured him. 

“There should be a Guide looking for me in a few minutes—point him my way if you see him.”

He headed up the steep path, following his nose. Before long he caught sight of the crime scene, decorated with yellow tape and a blue tarp, and the unlucky uniformed officer who had to guard it. After identifying himself to the uniform, he started looking around the edges of the crime scene. He’d keep his sense of smell dialed down to nothing, and stay away from the body itself, until the Guide showed up. 

By the time Sam came up the path, he had identified and marked two beer cans, a discarded newspaper, half a dozen cigarette butts, and something that might be a footprint. 

Sam slipped under the crime scene tape. “Detective Ellison.”

“Hi, Sam. You ready?”

Sam nodded and held out his hand. As soon as Jim took it, he felt Sam’s mind brush with his—and then Sam jerked away. “You didn’t say you were _Bonded_!”

“I’m not,” Jim said, reaching his hand out again.

“Yes, you are, Detective,” Sam said, putting his hands behind his back and stepping away. “I can’t link with a Bonded Sentinel.”

“I know you can’t, but I’m not,” Jim insisted. “I have a Guide—he’s at home; he’s sick—but we aren’t Bonded.”

Sam shrugged expressively. 

“What can I do? I need a Guide to work this crime scene.”

Shrugging again, Sam said, “Go get yours?”

“We _aren’t Bonded_ ,” Jim repeated. Sandburg was going to flip. If they were. Which they weren’t. “Let’s just—try again, okay?”

Sam gave him a skeptical look, but held out his hand. 

Sam held on for a little longer this time, but then withdrew, shaking his head. “You really are. Congratulations.”

“He’s going to fucking kill me,” Jim said. 

“Who?”

“Sandburg.” Jim briefly considered fleeing the country. Not that he’d get very far, if they really were Bonded. How the hell was he supposed to explain this?

Maybe Blair wouldn’t notice. After all, he hadn’t yet. But what the hell was he going to do about this crime scene? He couldn’t get anywhere near that body without a Guide. “Look,” he said to Sam, “maybe you can—no, you can’t.”

“No, sir.”

“I know. Never mind. Just sort of—stand over there.” Even without a working link, having a Guide nearby would help him control his senses. 

“Sir,” Sam said, and it was clear he was humoring him.

Jim made his way closer to the body, carefully keeping his sense of smell under control. When he pulled the tarp back from the body, both the patrol officer and the Guide recoiled from the smell, but Jim didn’t notice it. He’d have to slowly bring up his sense of smell and acknowledge the stench of decay, so he could move past it and detect any more subtle scent evidence it might be masking.

He dialed his sense of smell up slowly, a tiny fraction at a time. Long before he reached normal smelling level, the reek emanating from the body turned his stomach. But to move past it, he couldn’t simply ignore it; he had to _savor_ it. Linked with a Guide, he’d be able to dissociate himself from his disgust, but trying to do it now, Jim felt like he was groping around in the dark for a light switch. He pressed on anyway, trying to ignore his nausea and absorb the smell at the same time.

Moments later he was stumbling away from the crime scene, zoned on the rotting smell and dry-heaving. 

He managed to hold onto his breakfast until he made it just past the crime scene tape, then fell onto his hands and knees, heaving his guts out. He was blessedly unaware of anything that was going on around him until a few moments later he found himself crouched over a puddle of what had recently been corn flakes, with the Guide Sam patting his back. 

“I know,” Jim said, sitting back on his heels and spitting. “You told me so.”

“I didn’t say anything, Detective.”

Sam gave him a bottle of water, and he rinsed his mouth and spat again. 

The uniform came over, holding out a cell phone. “Your captain wants to speak with you, if you’re ready.”

He took the phone. “Ellison.”

“Jim, are you all right?”

“Yeah, I’m—I’ll manage. There’s a problem, though.”

“What kind of problem?”

“Sam can’t link with me—he says Sandburg and I are, uh, Bonded.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, so I was trying to work the scene anyway, and that didn’t turn out so well.” He wasn’t sure if the uniform had told Simon that he’d tossed his cookies; if not, Jim wasn’t going to be the one to mention it. “I’m not sure what to do, here.”

“Can’t the other Guide just….”

“It doesn’t work that way. It’s not just like f--” He remembered who he was talking to and changed the usual crude metaphor to, “kissing another man’s wife. It’s not possible.”

“All right.” Simon sighed. “Well, I can hand the case over to the 12th precinct—their Sentinel just made detective—or you can go get Sandburg. It’s your call.”

Neither of those choices appealed very much. He knew Krywarick, from the 12th, and he was an all right guy, but inexperienced. This might be a tough case.

On the other hand, keeping the case meant dragging Sandburg into it. 

Of course, in about a month, he wouldn’t have the option of keeping Blair away from crime scenes. “I have to ask Sandburg,” he finally admitted. He didn’t want to—for one thing, asking Sandburg meant telling him what he had—apparently, somehow—done. But Sandburg had every right to be involved in this decision. That was the other thing they had agreed on in the aftermath of that embarrassing scene in front of Kas and Temas: Jim was not going to make what Sandburg called “unilateral decisions about _my_ life.” 

“All right. Keep me posted.”

#

Blair was trying to work his way through a few simple yoga poses—weeks of not moving very much had him stiff and weak—when he had the sudden impression that Jim was on his way. He glanced at the clock—not even eleven; it was way too early. He grunted his way from a forward bend into a child’s pose. Once he was in it, he realized that getting _out_ of it would be a challenge. He was still stuck folded in half, with his face on the floor, when he heard the doorknob rattle.

_Shit_! If that wasn’t Jim—and it couldn’t be Jim, it was too early for Jim—who the hell was it? He squirmed onto his side and from there managed to get flipped onto his back. He was still trying to get his legs under him when the door opened.

“What the hell are you doing, Chief?” Jim asked.

“Yoga,” he said, sitting up. 

“That’s yoga?” Jim asked, helping him up.

“Not exactly. You’re early—what’s up?” Jim seemed off somehow, a little tense. Had something gone wrong at work? Was he upset with Blair over something?

“Yeah. About that.”

Blair waited.

“I was at a crime scene, and I had one of the department Guides there to help me work it.”

Blair didn’t like the sound of that at all—but of course, if Jim was working, and he wasn’t, what else was he going to do? “Okay,” he said.

“Right, so he said, uh, when he tried to link up with me, he said he couldn’t because I was already Bonded.”

What the hell?

“Sorry, Chief,” Jim added. “I know you didn’t want to. I don’t know how it happened—maybe he’s wrong?”

“Shit.” It was true, he hadn’t wanted to—Bonding meant giving up any hope he’d ever had of someday, somehow, getting his own life back. 

Not that that had been a particularly realistic hope before. And it was _Jim_. “Shit,” he said again, struggling to pull himself out of his shocked stupor enough to say something else. “Let’s—can we link up?”

“Yeah—how do you want to do it?”

“Whatever you usually do.”

“I usually hold hands,” Jim said.

Well, that wouldn’t work.

“Here.” Jim pushed up Blair’s sleeve and wrapped his hand around his forearm, just above the cast. “That work?”

“Yeah.” Normally, when he linked up with a Sentinel, he had to scrabble around for a place to make contact, but now it was as if Jim’s mind just wrapped around his, the same way Jim’s hand wrapped around his arm. “Okay—okay, break it off.”

Jim let go, and Blair felt him slip away—except for a single thread that ran between them. “Feel that?” he asked, tugging on it.

“Yeah. That’s…weird. Is that what a Bond feels like?”

“How would I know?”

“Because—you know all about this stuff!”

“Theoretically!” Blair moved down to the other and of the couch and took a deep breath. “Okay. How could this have happened?”

“I was kind of hoping you’d know.”

“Okay. Most people, these days, they Bond by starting a working link and then leaving it open for as long as it takes. A day or two.” Jim probably knew that.

“Yeah.”

“There are other ways. But they’re usually _more_ complicated, not less. Rituals, initiation rites, vision quests—that type of thing. Not anything we could have done by accident. I have to--” He stopped abruptly.

“What?”

“I was going to say, research this.” He laughed mirthlessly, scratching at his temple with his thumb. Research was the first resort he turned to in times of trouble, but it was closed to him now. “I guess it doesn’t really matter.” Finding a reference in an anthropological journal to a society where Sentinels and Guides Bonded through some means they could have done inadvertently wouldn’t undo it, after all. 

“I’m really sorry, Chief.”

“ _You_ didn’t do it. If anybody did it, I did it…and I didn’t do it.”

“I guess it just—happened.”

“I guess.” It hadn’t “just happened,” though—something had made it happen, and he did want to know what, even if it didn’t make a difference. The Sentinel-Guide Bond was seen in different ways in different societies—as a working partnership, as a marriage of souls, as a mystical destiny. That it could happen _unintentionally_ was new information, and he was anxious to figure out how it fit in with what he already knew.

He was aware that he was wondering What it Meant anthropologically to avoid worrying about what What it Meant personally for him and Jim. But, he decided, he was okay with that. What It Meant for him and Jim was a topic he’d like to avoid for as long as possible. He knew, intellectually, that being Bonded with Jim was probably the best thing for him, in practical terms. Jim wouldn’t hurt him, wouldn’t let anyone else hurt him if he could help it. With Jim, he’d be fed, warm, and safe—at least at home. Work would be a different story since there were, as Jim pointed out, criminals there. But there wasn’t any other option for him that guaranteed even that much. 

But there was a vast chasm between recognizing that fact intellectually and accepting it emotionally, and there was probably one hell of a freak-out lurking at the bottom of that chasm. Right now, though, he just felt numb. The freak-out must be coming later.

He was definitely okay with that, too. “Okay,” he finally said. “Okay, so we’re…yeah.” 

“Right,” Jim said. “I actually came back early because, uh, there’s that crime scene.”

“Oh?” He sat up straight. “You want me to go with you?”

“I don’t,” Jim said. “Want you to. It’s a bad one. But.” Jim sighed. “I guess I need you to. If you’re willing to go.”

“Of course I am. Uh—how bad?” He did want to get out and start helping Jim—but he hadn’t really thought about the reality of a gruesome crime scene. 

“Bad.” Jim rubbed at the back of his neck. “A woman was strangled, and the body went undiscovered for two or three weeks. You probably want to skip lunch. If you go.”

“Okay.” It would be bad. But he had to get used to this kind of thing someday. Maybe it was for the best, if his first day was as bad as it got. “Okay. I guess I need some shoes and a jacket.”

“Guess so. I’ll get you some.”

Last time they’d gone out, to the bookstore, he’d worn a pair of Jim’s shoes over his bandages and several pairs of socks. Jim went up to the bedroom and came down with the same pair, plus a button-down shirt. “Here,” he said, holding out the shirt. “It’s cold, you should--”

“Yeah.” Jim helped him into the shirt and buttoned him into it. He’d look a little bit more presentable that way, anyway. True, his sweatpants weren’t exactly work attire, and Jim’s shirt was too big for him—still, they were going to a crime scene, not a debutante ball.

Fortunately. 

So with no more discussion than that, they got in Jim’s truck and headed for the crime scene. 

“Are you okay, man?” Blair asked. “You’re really…quiet.” It occurred to him for the first time that Jim probably hadn’t been in any big hurry to Bond with him, either. Now Jim was stuck with him, he liked it or not.

“Yeah. I just—don’t like this.”

Right. “Sorry.” He looked out the window and sighed.

“Wait, Chief.” Jim pulled the truck over to the shoulder of the road. “I meant taking you to this crime scene. It’s a pretty rough first day. I’m not upset about the other thing. I mean, it stinks that it happened when you weren’t ready for it, but I figured we were in this for the long haul anyway.”

“You mean that?” Blair asked. 

“Yeah. C’mere.” He held out his arm, and Blair scooted across the bench seat to press against his side. “You’re my Guide, Chief.”

The scene was—bad. Blair had never seen the end result of a violent death before. He knew the funerary practices of a hundred different cultures, but this woman had been the beneficiary of none of them. 

It would have been nice to say he was thinking about the waste of it, the disrespect, how this woman—whoever she was—hadn’t deserved to die like this and be left to rot like garbage. But any thoughts like that were driven to the back of his mind by the overwhelming reek of decay. He’d used tin-roofed outhouses in high summer in villages without modern sanitation, had visited a slum that had sprang up around the garbage dump outside Mexico City, but he’d never smelled anything that compared to this. 

“Easy,” Jim said, rubbing his back. “Take your time. Take deep breaths—and if you’re going to puke, try to do it outside the tape. That way Forensics doesn’t have to photograph it.”

Blair appreciated the attempt at humor, but throwing up was a very real possibility. He swallowed hard, then swallowed again. “I’m okay. Let’s go.”

He only made it a few more steps, though, before he wasn’t okay at all. He heaved, and tried to remind himself that if Jim saw him puke at his very first crime scene, he was never going to believe Blair was strong enough for this. But then he didn’t care anymore, because he was bent over, his casted hands scrabbling for purchase on his knees, throwing up the memory of everything he had ever eaten. And possibly the memory of things Naomi had eaten before he was born.

Eventually, when the heaving finally stopped, Jim guided him to sit on a log on the other side of the path. There was a little bit of a breeze coming from off the water, and if they faced that way, it was…bearable.

Jim disappeared for a moment and came back with a bottle of water. “Here, rinse your mouth out.”

He did that, swishing the water around in his mouth and spitting it on the other side of the log. “Oh, man,” he sighed.

“Here.” Jim put the water down and took something else out of his pocket—a small container of Vicks Vapo-Rub. “Put some of this under your nose, and it helps with the smell.” 

Jim unscrewed the top, and Blair used his thumb to smear the stuff on his upper lip. It was nasty, but—yeah, under the circumstances, the lesser of two evils. 

“I’d have gotten some on the way if I had thought of it, but I just dial down smell,” Jim said, shrugging. “Luckily the uniform had some.”

“You must think I’m a wuss.”

Jim shook his head. “At least five people have puked near this crime scene—and one of them was me. Anyway, everybody pukes at their first DB. It’s like one of those rites of passage you were talking about the other day.”

“Oh, great. Today, I am a man.” 

Jim chuckled. “Want some more water?”

“Yeah, okay.”

Jim held the bottle for him to take a sip, saying, “Not too much, or you’ll--”

Puke again. “Yeah, I know.”

“Need a few more minutes?”

Blair took a deep breath. “I think I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”

Jim took his arm, pushing up the sleeves of his jacket and both shirts, and led him back across the path and under the tape.

The body was under a tarp—probably to keep the rain off—and Blair was glad that Jim left it that way for a while, examining the area in a spiral pattern starting at the perimeter of the crime scene tape. He knew from his reading that there were different ways to do it—in a spiral starting at the middle, in wedge-shaped quarters or eighths, and so on. He wondered if Jim always used this method, or if he’d chosen it to be easier on Blair. 

Eventually, though, they made it to the center, and Jim uncovered the body. It was a girl, maybe college-age. The body was so bloated and discolored he couldn’t get an idea of her race from her skin color, but she had blonde hair. White, then. 

The smell of the uncovered body cut through the Vicks, and his gorge rose, but he controlled himself by taking deep, slow breaths through his mouth. It wasn’t any worse, Blair told himself, than the observation he’d done at the city morgue, as an undergrad. Jim was breathing deeply, too, but through his nose. Man, that had to be rough. 

“Damn,” Jim said. 

“Hm?”

“She was sexually assaulted.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah,” Jim said grimly. He went back over the ground they had already covered, stopping abruptly and dropping Blair’s arm. Pulling a latex glove over one hand, he poked through the leaf litter and came up with a sodden scrap of paper—a paper towel, maybe, or one of those personal wipes. “Come here and flag this,” he called over his shoulder.

The uniformed officer came over and stuck a flag—something like a popsicle stick with a scrap of surveyor’s tape tied to the top—into the ground, then held out an evidence bag for what Jim had found. Customs of the tribe, Blair told himself. It wasn’t a funerary rite, but it was a death ritual—no, a protection ritual, to prevent the rest of the tribe from dying as this woman had. 

“The ME will want that,” Jim told the other cop. “And this cigarette butt,” he added, pointing to something that was already flagged, “that was his, too. I’m not sure about these two—they’re the same brand, but I’m not getting his scent off of them.”

The cop bagged and tagged the evidence, noting down where each item had been picked up and what Jim had said about it. 

“The newspaper’s nothing; it’s five days older than the body, at least. Bag it anyway, in case he staked out the scene the week before, but I don’t think so. Scent’s washed off the beer cans—Forensics should check them for prints, but they’re probably washed off too. And forensics and the ME can have the scene.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That means we’re done, Chief,” Jim added to him. 

It was a ritual phrase, then—he could have just said, “we’re done,” but the ritual required the more formal wording. 

On the path back to the parking lot, they passed an Asian woman under a black umbrella. “I’ll be sitting in on the autopsy,” Jim told her. Must be the ME, then.

“I’ll let you know when I schedule it. Anything I should know?”

“She’s been dead between ten and eighteen days---probably between twelve and sixteen, but I want to look at the weather records first. Sexually assaulted. Lots of sources of DNA around the scene, as well as in the body.”

“Great,” the woman sighed. “Well, maybe his DNA will be in the database.”

“This has to be his first time,” Jim said, shaking his head. “It’s a mess. The only thing he did right was put the body where it wouldn’t be found right away, but even that looks like it was mostly luck. If all criminals were this stupid, we’d be out of a job.”

“Thank God for job security. This your new Guide?”

“Yeah—Blair Sandburg, Dr. Linda Ling.”

“Uh, hi,” Blair said, waving his cast. None of his other Sentinels had made a habit of introducing him to people. 

“Nice meeting you. Guess I’d better stop stalling,” she said, and started back up the path.

They went the rest of the way down the path, and Jim helped him into the truck. “I should get back to the station—do you want me to drop you off at home on the way?”

“Uh….” He had a lot to process, but he wasn’t sure he really wanted to sit in the apartment all by himself until five, with nothing to do _but_ process. Distraction might be his friend right now.

“You might as well come in to the station,” Jim decided. “You’re not going to be ready for lunch for a while?”

“No.” That, he was sure about.

“Then you can hang out at the station for a while, and in a couple of hours we’ll get lunch and I’ll take you home. Okay?”

“Okay—stop talking about food,” Blair added. 

“Sorry.”

When they walked into the police station, Blair could feel Jim’s guard go up. Blair stuck close to his side, hoping to reassure Jim that he was perfectly safe. 

Jim’s division, Major Crimes, was on the third floor. His desk was tucked into a corner of a big room with about half a dozen other desks. It was a familiar arrangement—the anthro grad student office at the university had been a similar, bullpen-type setup—but it seemed like a challengingly chaotic environment for a Sentinel. At this moment Blair himself could hear three conversations—two on the telephone and one in person—the clatter of several keyboards, and a high-pitched whine that had to be either a computer monitor or the overhead lights. He couldn’t imagine what else Jim was hearing.

Jim seemed to be handling it fine, though. As they moved through the busy room to his desk, he acknowledged the other detectives’ greetings appropriately, while it was still obvious—to his Guide, at least—that he was on the alert for any potential danger. 

Once they made it to Jim’s desk, he installed Blair in a wooden armchair and sat in his own desk chair. “Give me your foot.”

“Huh?”

“I want to get that shoe off—bacteria, infection, remember any of that?”

“It’s pretty much healed,” Blair pointed out, putting his foot up in Jim’s lap.

“‘Pretty much healed’ isn’t the same thing as ‘healed.’ You want the other shoe on or off?”

Having one shoe on and one off felt weird. “Off.”

He started to switch feet, but Jim tsked, “Don’t put your foot down on this floor. It’s disgusting.”

The area surrounding Jim’s desk looked considerably cleaner than the rest of the bullpen, but Blair decided not to argue the point. He rested his bad foot on the opposite thigh, then sat cross-legged in the chair once Jim had both shoes off. 

“Jim.” Simon stuck his head out of a door near Jim’s desk. “Come talk to me, when you’re ready.”

Jim looked like he wanted to argue about _that_ , but instead he clenched his jaw and scanned the rest of the room. “H?”

A heavyset black man looked over. 

“Do me a favor—keep an eye on this one while I’m with Simon,” he said, tapping Blair on the head. 

“Sure thing, Jim.”

Any of the other Sentinels he’d worked with, it would have been clear that Jim meant, “watch him to make sure he doesn’t try to leave, move, touch my stuff, talk to anybody, or do anything other than breathe and keep his mouth shut.” Blair was sure that Jim didn’t mean that, but he wasn’t sure what H would think he had been asked to do.

As Jim went into Simon’s office, H ambled over. “Henri Brown,” he said, holding out his hand. “Most people call me H.”

Okay. Blair held up his cast. “Hi. Blair Sandburg.”

“You must be Jim’s new Guide?”

“Yeah—that’s me.”

H pointed out the other people in the room, identifying them. “We’re all Jim’s friends, so if you need anything, just holler.”

“Okay. Okay, thanks.” Simon had said, weeks ago when they had met, that he was “part of the team.” H, at least, seemed to think that too. 

Shortly after H returned to his own desk, another man came out of the break room. He was older, maybe about fifty, and dressed more neatly than most of the detectives, in chinos and a blazer. When his eyes fell on Blair, he made a bee-line for Jim’s desk. Blair recognized him instantly as another Guide.

“Sam Levin,” he introduced himself, pushing some folders aside and perching on the edge of Jim’s desk. “I’m one of the department Guides.”

“Nice to meet you,” Blair said. “Blair Sandburg.”

“Ellison.”

“Hm?”

Sam grinned. “Not used to it yet, huh? You are Jim’s new one, aren’t you?”

“Oh, um, yeah.” He had forgotten that here, Bonded Guides took their Sentinels’ last names. “I’m keeping my name.”

Sam’s brows went up in surprise. “You can do that?”

Blair had no idea. “Guess I’ll find out.”

“Huh.” Sam looked discomfited for a moment, then shook himself. “Congratulations, anyway. Really great news, for you and Detective Ellison. He’s my favorite of the department’s Unbonded Sentinels—not that I’m jealous or anything, don’t worry about that.”

“Okay,” Blair said. Since he hadn’t wanted this, it hadn’t really occurred to him that anyone _would_ be jealous.

“A lot of the Bonded Guides look at me like I’m the last puppy at the pound, but I like being on my own. I have my own little apartment, so when I get home I don’t have to answer to anybody. It’s nice.” 

Sam’s tone had a definite air of whistling past the graveyard, but Blair just agreed, “It does sound nice.” Nobody had told him it was even possible for Guides to live alone, rather than with a Sentinel or in a G-TAC dormitory. He wondered what you had to do to qualify for that arrangement.

Probably not be a draft-dodger, for starters. 

“I like it. The idea, being a department Guide, is that you’ll work with a bunch of different Sentinels and eventually Bond with one of them, but—well, I just never met the right one. I did have offers,” he added, in a tone too offhand to be really offhand. 

“Is that how it works? How many Unbonded Sentinels are there in the police department?”

“Seven—six, now. Two of them are just young—they’ll Bond eventually, I think one of them has his eye on Melissa—she’s one of the other Department Guides. But apart from Jim, the ones that stay Unbonded long have something _seriously_ wrong with them.”

Blair nodded. He knew all about that—the Sentinels he had been assigned to had had all had difficulty Bonding. 

“Well, one, Ruggieri, he’s just not very powerful, and he has good control, so he doesn’t need a Guide at home. He’s actually married. To a normal woman, I mean. He’s all right. But the other ones—pfft. There’s a reason they’re still on the shelf, and it’s that no one would have them. Detective Ellison’s the only prize in this particular cereal box.”

Sam might deny that he was jealous, Blair thought, but he was definitely at least a little…wistful. He wondered what to say about that—deny that Jim was really all that great? Suggest that the right Sentinel was out there somewhere? Admit that having his own apartment sounded pretty goddamn great to him? 

Being Bonded to Jim was, well, not so bad compared to other things that could have happened, but if he could trade with Sam, be a Guide like it was a _job_ and still have a little bit of a life of his own, he’d take that deal in a second. But he couldn’t really say that, not when it was almost certain to get back to Jim one way or another. 

Fortunately, Sam didn’t seem to be depending on his participation in this conversation. “Not too long ago, they sent me over to the state police barracks for one of their Sentinels—her control was so bad she couldn’t even drive—and she was on highway patrol—she had to pretty much huddle over a white-noise generator just to stay sane. She really needed a Guide at home, so I agreed to a two-week try-out. At first I felt sorry for her—at first. The woman was. A. Nightmare. She was one of those ones that doesn’t even use your name, just barks ‘Guide’ at you. When we were in her office, she had me _stand in the corner and face the wall_ , I shit you not. I told her, when the two weeks were up, that if she wanted some Guide to take pity on her and Bond with her, she ought to make a little effort to act like less of a tin-plated bitch, because the way she acts, the only way anyone would Bond with her was at gunpoint. She had me written up for that,” Sam reflected, “but it was completely worth it.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I know what you mean,” Blair said. He did. He’d gotten a lot worse than written up for his offenses in that line, though. Sam must have been a good boy for _decades_ to get away so lightly for that little crack. 

“I heard that before me, she had some poor kid straight out of G-TAC, she practically dragged him around on a leash.”

“Yeah,” Blair said. “Yeah, that was me. Officer Reinhold, right?”

“Yes—that was _you_?” Sam was actually stunned into silence for a moment, giving Blair plenty of time to regret having mentioned it. “Well, you deserve dreamboat Ellison for putting up with the Wicked Witch of the Northwest.”

“Thanks,” Blair said dryly. 

“I’m sure you’ll be happy,” Sam said, standing up as Jim came out of the office. “Congratulations, again, Detective Ellison,” he added.

“Thanks. Don’t sit on my desk.” Sam left, and Jim reclaimed his desk chair. “Sam’s a good guy.”

“Yeah, he seems nice.” What he really seemed like was a screaming queen; it was good to know that Jim was okay with that.

“But,” Jim continued, “don’t say anything to him unless you don’t mind the entire Cascade PD, his dry cleaner, the counter staff at the coffee shop across from his apartment, and people he sits next to on the bus hearing all about it.”

“Good to know.” He wondered if Sam would spread around the news about his association with Officer Reinhold, the nightmare. Well, Jim had read the file already, and he was the only one whose opinion really mattered. “He says you’re a dreamboat,” Blair added. 

“Yeah, he has kind of a thing for me,” Jim said distractedly, opening his file drawer and digging around inside it. 

“Did you ever--?”

Jim looked over at him. “Do I get to quiz you about your sex life?”

“Shutting up now.” He totally had, Blair thought—if not, he’d have said no.

Jim started writing on a form he had taken out of the drawer. “If we have to have the ‘what have you done and how many’ talk—since we are…you know.” Bonded, right. It was actually sort of Blair’s business, in a way. “But we’re not having it at work, Chief.”

Yes, Jim definitely had. He did do guys, then. Guide guys. Which Blair was. Huh.

“It wasn’t anything….”

“Serious?” Blair guessed. 

“Exploitative. And we’re not talking about it here.” 

“You brought it up.”

“ _You_ brought it up.”

“You brought it back up,” Blair clarified. 

Jim sighed. Blair decided to shut up for real, and just watch what was going on in the bullpen. Jim was just filling out paperwork, which wasn’t very interesting, but across the room, Detective Rafe was interviewing a woman. She was shaking, and looked near tears. Victim? He wondered. Witness? Criminal? And if so, remorseful or manipulative?

He still hadn’t decided when Jim’s phone rang. He picked it up, answering, “Ellison,” the same way he did at home. “Uh-huh.” He wrote something down on the pad. “Yeah—have the local PD—yes, give them my number. In the dorm? What room number?” Jim noted down a number and hung up. “Victim’s been identified. She was a sophomore at Rainer. Parents are in Idaho, so the police there get to notify them. I’m going to go talk to the roommate—you coming?”

“Yeah, sure.” Jim had done a quick about-face from not wanting him anywhere near his work; Blair wondered if there was a backlash coming. 

“We’re going to talk to a co-ed, Chief, it shouldn’t exactly be dangerous.” Jim helped him back into his shoes and jacket, and they headed out.

The campus looked…almost exactly as it had when Blair had gone there. The undergrads looked the same too, walking around in their jeans, and flannel shirts, or pajama bottoms and flip-flops. He wouldn’t look too out of place, in his sweatpants and oversized shirt—except for the giant he was walking next to, who screamed “Cop!” with every step he took. 

The women’s dorm was still called “Beaver Hall,” although it now appeared to have gone co-ed by floor. He wasn’t sure if that made the name better or worse. The elevator had one of the usual signs on it, saying, “Please don’t tie up the elevator if you are going less than 3 floors! Some of us live up on seven!!!” Jim ignored it and pushed the button for 3. The other elevator passengers, two girls who were going to 5, looked from Jim to the sign and, wisely, didn’t say anything.

On the third floor, a cacophonic variety of music poured out from rooms with open doors. “You okay, Jim?”

“Yeah. We’re looking for 319.”

Room 319 had two whiteboards on the door. One had “Lily is IN” written on it; the other said “Happy Valentine’s Day!!” surrounded by several hearts. 

Valentine’s day had been just over two weeks ago. Blair thumped just below the whiteboard with his cast.

“Yeah, I see,” Jim said. “That narrows it down some.” He knocked at the door. 

A girl in jeans and a tank top opened it. “Sorry, I can’t find—hello?”

“Jim Ellison, with the Cascade Police Department,” he said. 

“Oh my God—is this about Annie?”

Jim nodded. Along the hallway, doors that had been closed opened, and curious heads popped out. “Can we come in?”

“Sure—yeah, it’s a mess.” She stepped back, letting them in. A notebook computer and several textbooks were open on one of the desks. The other was heaped with books, packages of makeup, and a tangled handful of jewelry. The bed on that side of the room, too, was strewn with clothes—not the jeans, t-shirts, and flannels that a girl would wear to class, but the skirts, blouses, and dresses she’d choose to go on a date. 

“When did you see Annie last?” Jim asked.

“Thursday, three weeks ago,” Lily said. “It was—I remember because she was trying to decide what to wear for the Valentine’s dance, the next day? She was trying on all these outfits, and I was trying to study. Is she okay?”

“No,” Jim said. “I’m sorry. She’s not okay.”

“Oh, my God.” Lily sat down on her bed. “Is she….”

“She’s dead,” Jim confirmed. “What happened, after she was trying on the outfits? Did she leave the room?”

“Yeah.” Lily inhaled deeply. “She, uh, she said she was going to the coffee bar in Dempsey—it’s open later than our dining hall here. She said she was going to get out of my way so I could finish my paper, and we’d decide on our outfits later. She never came back.” Lily gave up her fight against tears. “If I hadn’t kicked her out of the room, she might still be alive, right?”

Jim looked uncomfortable. “What time was it when she left?”

“I don’t know—ten?” Lily fumbled in her nightstand drawer for a tissue. “It had to be after nine, because that’s when our dining hall closes. And Dempsey’s closes at midnight. They should put the place that’s open late in the girls’ dorm—it’s fine for guys walk all over campus at night.”

“Was she meeting anyone?”

“I don’t think so. I mean, she wasn’t planning to go or anything. She might have met someone there; I don’t know.”

“When did you notify someone about her disappearance?”

“Friday—Friday evening. I came back to get dressed for the dance, and I could see she hadn’t been back all day; she hadn’t picked up her books, or put any of her clothes away. I told the RA, and she called the campus police. Should I have called sooner? I mean, she didn’t usually stay out all night—unless Cory’s roommate was out of town. I started worrying around midnight, but I didn’t want to tell on her and have them call her parents if it turned out she was, you know, at Cory’s.” 

Jim nodded. “Cory’s her boyfriend?”

“Uh-huh.” Lily nodded, and blew her nose. “Oh my God, he doesn’t know yet, does he? Oh my God…” She looked toward the phone.

“We’ll take care of notifying him,” Jim said. “What’s his last name?”

“Warner. He lives in Dempsey, room 212.” 

“Was she seeing any other guys?”

“No. She’s been going out with Cory since fall formal.” 

“Has she mentioned any other guys who were interested in her, even if she wasn’t interested in them?”

“Um…there was this creepy guy in her math class. She said how he, like stares at her the whole time.”

“Does this creepy guy have a name?”

“I don’t think she ever said. She just calls him that creepy guy.” 

“Anybody else?”

“No. I can’t think of any other guys.”

“Okay. Thanks for your time--”

Lily had just about stopped crying, but now she started up again. “I can’t believe she’s really dead! It’s all my fault, if she had stayed in the room…”

“It’s not your fault, Lily,” Jim said awkwardly. “The only person to blame is the killer, and we’re going to find him.”

Blair wasn’t too surprised that Lily wasn’t comforted by that. “Can we get somebody for you? The RA?”

Jim looked over at him. 

“Yeah—yeah, okay,” Lily said between sniffles. “She’s, um, her room’s down that way.” She pointed. 

Jim didn’t actually object, out loud, so Blair went down the hall until he found the door marked RA. He tapped at the door with his cast, and a moment later a slightly older girl—maybe a senior—opened it. “Can I help you?”

“Yeah—I’m, uh, with the police.”

“Is this about Annie?”

Blair realized suddenly that the RA didn’t know yet that Annie was dead. He should have stayed with the crying girl, and Jim should have done this part. “Yeah. Can you come down to her and Lily’s room? Ah—maybe you can call someone from counseling services first, see if they can come over,” he added. RAs were the ones to turn to for normal student drama, but something like this was definitely over the head of an undergrad who had taken a 3-day RA orientation. 

“What’s going on?” the RA demanded.

“It’s…bad news. I think Detective Ellison should tell you. But Lily and the other girls who knew Annie are going to need someone to talk to.” 

He could see that she knew, and he could also see the moment she chose to pretend to herself that she didn’t. “Okay. I’ll just tell them we have an emergency. Just a minute.”

She went back into the room and made the call, then went back down to Lily’s room with him. As soon as they got into the room, the RA started crying too, and the two girls hugged. “Janine, the cops say Annie’s—that she was--”

Jim came over to stand by the door. “The RA, Chief?” he asked skeptically.

“Yeah—I said she should call counseling services. They’re on their way.”

“Oh.” Jim nodded, approving now. “Okay. We’ll come back and see if anyone else knows anything, after we talk to the boyfriend.” He passed out his cards to Lily and Janine, and they headed out. “Maybe someone has at least a first name for the creepy guy.”

“We can just get her class schedule from the Registrar, and ask the TA,” Blair suggested. 

“Will the TA know, if she didn’t complain about it?”

“Oh, yeah, the TA always knows who the class creep is.”

#

There was no answer at the boyfriend’s dorm room, so they headed for the Registrar’s office next. Jim asked for Cory’s class schedule, but it showed that he didn’t have a class at the time. He could be anywhere, so the next thing on the agenda was looking for the creepy guy. There were forty names on the roster for Annie’s math class, and at least half of them were men. He had his doubts that the TA would really know who the creepy guy was, but working their way through that many names would take forever. “All right, let’s try it your way first. Where can we find this TA?”

The Registrar was able to supply them with an office number, office phone, home address, and home phone. “I’d try the office first. Middle of the day, he’s not teaching—he’s likely to be in there,” Blair said. 

The math TA’s office was—naturally—in a completely different building from the three they had already been in. This one didn’t even have an elevator—with or without passive-aggressive signs—and the TA offices were on the top floor. “Why does everyone here put so much crap on their doors?” Jim wondered as they hiked down the hallway. 

“So they can impress everyone else with how clever and sophisticated their choice of comic strips and news clippings is. Or—yeah, look, here’s one who photocopied the table of contents from a journal he was published in. That’s how you can tell who’s a gigantic tool,” Blair explained. “If you’re at all suave, you just leave your contributor’s copies lying around where people can’t miss them.” 

Sandburg seemed to be handling things well so far—he’d kept his composure at the crime scene, and so far he’d been bouncing around campus like a kid on a field trip. Maybe it hadn’t hit him yet, that a young woman was dead. Maybe he was trying to make sure it _wouldn’t_ hit him. If that was it, Jim could have told him it wouldn’t work—he could put it off, sure, but it was going to hit him. Maybe not until they were home for the day, though. That would be for the best. He decided not to say anything.

Blair turned out to be right about one thing—the TA was in his office. When Jim broke the news that one of his students was dead, he went still, his mouth hanging open slightly. “Shit. I mean—shit.”

At least the TA didn’t start crying, like the girls had. Jim was terrible at the comforting-witnesses part of this job. “We’re trying to track down a young man who might have been giving her a hard time.”

“You don’t think Mark did this? It couldn’t have been him.”

He sure thought it was Mark now. When a witness immediately popped out with a name of who it couldn’t _possibly_ have been—well, nine time out of ten, that was the perp, and the tenth time, he had done something else. “Tell me about Mark,” Jim said. 

When they left the TA’s office a few minutes later, Jim had confirmation that Mark had stared at Annie during math class, and that he “just seemed a little off, you know?” The TA had also brought up Mark’s class schedule and dorm address on his computer—then suddenly remembered that he was supposed to treat that information as confidential. Blair had jumped in then, explaining to the TA that they really needed to talk to Mark before they could go home for the day, and that him giving them the information would save them a hike back to the admin building. The TA had eventually relented and printed out the schedule. 

“What do we do now?” Sandburg asked as they walked out of the math building and back to the truck. “Go pick up Creepy Mark and give him the third degree?”

“No,” Jim said, taking out his cell phone. “Some uniforms pick up Creepy Mark and take him to the station for questioning, while we take you home.”

“Aw, Jim,” Blair complained.

“You’ve been a big help so far—but I really don’t need you in the room—or in the building—while I question a guy I think _rapes and strangles co-eds for fun_.” 

Sandburg gulped and went kind of pale. Maybe that had been blunter than necessary, but Jim didn’t want to argue about this. Jim patted Sandburg’s arm. 

“Let’s get you settled at home, and I’ll be back by five.” Jim was betting that Creepy Mark would have cracked by then—he was not a criminal mastermind—but if not, Jim would have to let him stew while he waited for forensics and the autopsy to give him something to move forward with. He’d also have to take some hysterical phone calls from the parents and various university officials, but if he wasn’t done with those by five, he could finish them at home. 

“Okay,” Blair agreed, all the bounce gone out of him. 

Jim got his arm around Blair’s shoulders and gave him a squeeze. “You did good today—it was a rough crime scene, and getting the RA and the counseling people for those girls was a good idea. You were right about the TA, and you got him to cough up the address—that saved us a lot of time. That’s plenty for a first day.”

“Thanks,” Blair said, perking up slightly. “Yeah, I was pretty great, wasn’t I?”

“Sure. Now when the girl’s parents call, I’ll be able to tell them we have a suspect in custody.” Not that it was a huge amount of comfort, to the parents, but it gave him something to say after, “I’m so sorry for your loss.” 

Once they were home, Jim talked Sandburg into eating a little something, got him settled, and went back to work. Creepy Mark—whose real name was Mark Cahill—was installed in interview room one, where he’d been stewing since the uniforms brought him in.

“What’s going on?” Cahill demanded as soon as Jim came into the room. “I have a 3:40 class. You can’t keep me here.” He was creepy—he had that indefinable _something_ about him that made ordinary people feel uncomfortable around him. They were lucky, in a way, that they were catching him now, on his first time out. 

He was in a hurry? Good. Jim slowly sat down, crossed his legs ankle over knee, and sipped at a cup of coffee. “We just want to ask you a few questions,” he said ponderously, as if he had to think his way through each word before letting it out of his mouth. “Nothing to worry about.”

#

Sitting on the couch, Blair twisted himself into a vague approximation of the half-lotus position. He really did have a lot of things to process. Where to start? Somehow, it seemed, he had won the argument with Jim about when he’d start work—but not in a way he would have hoped for. Today he had seen the dead body of a young woman who had been brutally murdered. He’d spent part of the day on the campus of his old college, around people who were still allowed to have the life that used to be his. Jim had said he’d done well. He’d discovered that he and Jim were Bonded. And that Jim did, in fact, fuck guys. Guide guys. _Start anywhere_ , he told himself helpfully. 

Fuck it. Blair decided to watch Oprah instead. 

#

“How’d it go? Did Creepy Mark do it?” Blair asked almost as soon as Jim was in the door. 

“He hasn’t admitted it yet.” To his surprise, Cahill hadn’t cracked. “But yeah, he did it.” Even when he found out that they’d matched his fingerprints to a partial on one of the cigarette butts at the crime scene, Cahill had kept his cool. He’d also realized, apparently, that it was only a matter of time before they got a warrant for his DNA and matched it to what they found inside the girl, and he’d made up a story. “He claims he and Annie went out to the park for a date—at ten o’clock, on a Thursday night, in the rain—and had consensual sex. He left, and apparently someone else must have come along and strangled her just after.” Not a particularly good story, but Cahill was sticking to it like glue. 

“Wow. Any chance it actually happened that way?”

Jim let his skepticism show on his face. “One in a million, maybe. Outside of an episode of Law and Order, though, the guy who obviously did it is nearly always the guy who actually did it.” If Blair had been reading those criminology textbooks, he knew that, but it was easy for people to believe that what they’d seen on TV a hundred times was true, as opposed to what they’d just read about. Happened with new cops all the time. 

“Yeah.”

“I don’t think he really expects anyone to buy his story,” Jim continued. “He’s just going for reasonable doubt. He knows he’s fucked, so he might as well roll the dice with a jury. We’ll have to spend the next couple of days pinning down as much evidence as we can, and then it’s up to the DA try to make a jury notice that the difference between his story and ours is that ours has a mountain of evidence to back it up, and his has nothing.” He knew there was a decent chance that the jury would ignore all the evidence and believe that the two versions of events were equally plausible; it happened all the time. 

“I could use you at the autopsy tomorrow, and when I search Cahill’s dorm room,” he admitted. He had thought about trying to make today a one-time event, until Blair was fully recovered, but he knew that Blair would never sit still for that. And it had been all right—Sandburg made himself useful in more ways than one, he seemed comfortable enough at the station, and Jim had discovered that he wasn’t really any more anxious actually having the kid on the job than he was worrying about it. He might as well start getting used to it.

“Autopsy?” Sandburg’s heart rate accelerated, but he said calmly, “Sure, I can do that.” 

“You ever been to an autopsy before, Chief?”

“Uh…I saw an embalming once. As an undergrad I did an observation at a funeral home. But no, no actual autopsy, with the cutting and the—weighing, and everything.”

“Well, let’s see how you do,” Jim decided. Observing autopsies was part of the job. “I won’t be moving around, so you can close your eyes if you want to.”

“Okay—yeah, that’d be good.” Jim waited, thinking that Blair would have something more that he wanted to talk about—questions about the crime scene, anger about the unexpected Bonding, grief over the poor dead girl, _something_ —but Sandburg just said, “What are we having for dinner? I’m starving.”

“Chops?” Jim suggested.

Sandburg didn’t bring up any serious topics of conversation over dinner, either, or when they were watching TV afterwards. Finally when the news came on, Jim asked, “Anything on your mind, Chief?”

“Hm?” Blair glanced over at him. “No. I’m good.”

He did seem all right, just a little…subdued. When a news segment about the mid-East came on, he did treat Jim to a ten-minute lecture on the historical differences between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, so it wasn’t that Sandburg didn’t want to talk—he just didn’t want to talk about anything personal.

Jim could definitely get behind that. He didn’t think it would work, but he could get behind it. 

He wasn’t proved right, however, until a couple of hours after they went to bed, when he woke and heard Sandburg crying downstairs. The kid was being quiet about it—there wasn’t much to hear except a lot of uneven breathing and the occasional sinus-clogging sniff—but Jim wasn’t a Sentinel for nothing. And that was his—he winced—his _Bonded_ Guide down there. He pulled on a robe over his boxer shorts and padded down the stairs. 

Pulling back the curtain they’d hung over the doorway to Sandburg’s room, he said, “Chief?”

Blair swallowed thickly. “I’m Oh--” _sniff_ “—kay, Jim.”

“Yeah, you sound okay.” He went into the room and sat on the edge of the bed, where Sandburg promptly burrowed into his lap. “What’s the matter, Chief?”

Sandburg laughed humorlessly. 

“I mean, you’ve got a lot of stuff to be upset about, sure. Any one in particular?”

“No,” Blair said into the shoulder of his robe. “All of it. It’s just too much, man. You know?”

He nodded, rubbing Sandburg’s back between his shoulder blades. 

“I think I ought to feel worse about that girl than I do. Annie, I mean. She’s dead, and she’s just a kid—I used to have students that age—but I’m just kind of numb. Only then I start thinking about how she had her life stolen from her and Creepy Mark is going down for it, but when the government of my fucking country takes _my_ life from me, I’m supposed to be—I don’t know. I know it’s not the same thing. I’m still alive. I know it’s fucked up that I think Annie was kind of…lucky.”

Sandburg went tense in his arms, and he thought carefully about how he wanted to answer. Part of him wanted to say “Lucky? Really? You think you have it worse than _raped, strangled, and left to rot_?” But then, it had been over for Annie pretty quickly—maybe a terror-filled hour or two—and Sandburg had been tortured for more than a year. Sandburg, though, was still alive. And was it really that bad, now, being stuck with Jim?

“Not _lucky_ , lucky,” Blair continued anxiously. “But—it’s just not fair.”

That was easy to answer. “No, it’s not.” 

“I mean, I like you, and everything. But this isn’t my life. Being back on campus—brought all that back. That TA guy? That used to be me. It’s selfish as hell, but I can’t get past that.”

Jim seized on the part of that he was in a position to say something about. “You don’t have to bleed for every victim you come across—you _can’t_ bleed for every victim you come across, or you’ll go crazy.” It took some cops a long time to figure that out, and he had figured Sandburg for that category, but never let it be said that Jim couldn’t roll with the punches. “Don’t worry about that. We figured out who did it; that’s our job. It’s her parents’ job, her friends’ job, to grieve for her. Feeling bad about not feeling worse is—pointless.”

“I guess,” Sandburg said glumly, with another huge sniff. “But then I’m—that just brings me back around to the other thing. Figuring out who did it _isn’t_ my job. It’s not supposed to be. I’m an anthropologist. Only I’m not anymore, and I’m never going to get my own life back.”

“This _is_ your life now, Chief,” Jim reminded him. 

“I know. And it could be a hell of a lot worse—man, do I know how much worse it could be. But this—the Bonding thing?—it just makes it so much more real. I was kind of pretending, before, that maybe one day I could—I knew they were never gonna let me go, really. But now even if G-TAC did let me go—even if the Supreme Court stepped down off a cloud and said the draft is unconstitutional—I’m still stuck. I mean, it’s not your fault, either. But I—the whole thing is, I never wanted to be the guy who follows the other guy around. I wanted to be the guy. Doctor Blair Sandburg, Professor of Anthropology. Now it’s like I’m half of this Blair-Jim creature, and I don’t even know who he is.”

“A damn good cop, it looks like, so far.” Jim was pretty glad about that, but he could see why Blair wasn’t. After all, being a cop was _his_ job. Yeah, being a Sentinel had given him a limited set of options, but he’d had some choice. This was what he’d chosen, and he was good at it. He could learn to do something else, but he didn’t want to—and he didn’t have to. 

Sandburg did, though. The Bond had, in some ways, changed him from Sandburg’s rescuer into his jailer. And that was one career he’d never wanted. 

“Maybe I’ll get to like it,” Blair was saying. “I mean, look at Kas—I guess being an Army Ranger isn’t something you just give up, but he seems all right with being a nurse now.”

Jim thought about what that would be like—if, after going through the hell that was Ranger School, how would he have liked it if the army had said, “Sorry, you did all that for nothing, now you have to go do something else instead?” What if instead of Blair following him into _his_ job, he had to follow Blair into his? He could probably handle it—this anthropology stuff was interesting enough, and from listening to Blair’s stories about expeditions he’d been on, he could see how Sentinel abilities would come in handy—but he was a _cop_. And he had been a solider—a damn good one of those, too. If the draft board had said, “Now you’re going to follow this grad student around and help him grade his tests and type his notes and make sure the natives don’t kill him—sorry, but a Guide needs a Sentinel and that’s just how it is”—well, he would have kicked like a mule.

“How much more did you have to do on your doctorate?” Jim asked suddenly.

“Two semesters of coursework—that’s four seminars—and the dissertation. Most people take two or three years on the diss. So I was pretty close.”

“Do you have to—people sometimes do graduate school when they have another job, don’t they? They just do it slower?” 

Sandburg pulled away from him enough that he could look Jim in the face. “Yeah. People do that. They take one course a semester, usually, and then the dissertation takes five or six years. A lot of people never finish that way—it’s easy to take a semester off and just never get back to it. But—what are you saying here, Jim?” His heart was beating fast now; he _knew_ what Jim was saying, he just couldn’t quite trust it yet. 

“You could do it,” Jim said. “I mean, I have no idea what happens after you finish the doctorate, but if that’s going to be six or eight years away, we can figure that out when we get there.” Was there such a thing as a part-time college professor? There had to be—all those people going back to night school when they had other jobs; somebody had to teach them. And the field work part of it—how long did the trips have to be? He got four weeks of vacation a year. Was that enough for an anthropologist to get anything done? If not, he could save up his vacation and take eight weeks every two years, or twelve weeks every three years—whatever it ended up being. 

“Jim, that would be—you sure? I mean, it’s not just a matter of going to class for a couple of hours a week. I’d have to do reading, observations, write papers. For every three hours a week in class, you have to plan on ten or twelve hours of other work.”

“Sounds like it would cut into your TV-watching time something fierce, but as long as that doesn’t bother you, it doesn’t bother me.”

“Oh, man.” Blair ran his cast over his head. “That would be cool. Really cool. Is—could we really do that? I don’t think G-TAC is going to like it.”

“I don’t really see how they can stop you,” Jim said, after thinking about it for a moment. If Blair wanted to do it, and Jim wanted to stop him, it was obvious whose side they would come down on—but as a Bonded Sentinel, it was pretty much up to him how his Guide spent his time. “We’ll have to look at the regulations. I know there’s nothing against Guides getting college degrees or even graduate degrees.” 

Blair nodded. “Kas has an RN; that’s a Masters degree.”

“Hell, if you wanted a degree in Criminology or something, you could get them to pay for it. Probably not worth asking for this, though.” Even if G-TAC couldn’t stop them, it wasn’t something they wanted to draw attention to. 

“Oh,” Blair said suddenly, his shoulders drooping. “I kind of forgot about paying for it. I always had TA-ships before—where you teach an undergrad class or two, and then they give you free tuition? You pretty much always have to be a full-time student to get those, though.”

“How expensive it is going to be?” Jim wondered. All he knew about the subject was from hearing some of the other detectives talking about paying for their kids’ college. He had a vague memory of hearing numbers like, “Twenty thousand dollars a year.”

“I don’t know—part time, they charge you by the credit. So three or four credits, times—I don’t even know what it is. Five hundred dollars? A thousand?”

That was it? “So we’re only talking about, at the most, four thousand dollars?” Or as little as fifteen hundred? 

“Per semester, yeah. Plus books, and sometimes there are lab fees….But it might not be a thousand, I’m just guessing. I don’t think it’s any more than that. It might be less.” 

Four thousand, maybe less, that was nothing. “Don’t even worry about it, then.” 

“It can really add up,” Sandburg fretted. 

“Yeah, but you’re going to be starting at twenty-two thousand a year at the police department, and you don’t have any expenses,” Jim explained. He’d checked the salary table last week, but had forgotten to mention it to Blair. “Now that we’re Bonded, they’re going to tax you in my bracket,” he realized. “That’s going to cost you a couple thousand dollars a year. But I could pay you back for that, if it’s a problem.” Or maybe he’d just pay the taxes for both of them—if Sandburg wasn’t used to reading a pay stub, maybe he wouldn’t even notice that he wasn’t having as much deducted as he should. 

“Twenty-two thousand _dollars_?” Blair asked.

“Yeah, it’s not that much.” He’d learned that the increases Blair’s degrees made him eligible for wouldn’t kick in until he also had a couple of years with the department, which he supposed was fair. A college degree wasn’t much good without real-world experience behind it. “It’ll go up fast, though, once you have two years in. And you don’t have to pay for medical and dental, and you can wait until your increases kick in before you start paying in to your retirement fund.” 

“It sounds like plenty to me,” Blair said. “My TA stipend was more like six thousand American. And you’re just going to _give_ it to me?”

“No, _I’m_ not going to give it to you,” Jim said, wondering how Blair had gotten to this point in his life without understanding how employment worked. “The city is going to pay you for the work that you’ll be doing.”

“No,” Blair said. “They’re going to pay _you_ for the work that I’ll be doing. That’s how they do it, if you’re living with your Sentinel—Bonded or not—they just stick your pay onto his check. The idea is that you’ll take out expenses and give me what’s left, but I never saw a dime in any of my other placements.”

“What the hell?” Okay, it made sense that a Guide would put something toward the joint expenses—a Sentinel might need to get a bigger apartment if there were two people living in it, and even if not, the groceries and utilities would go up—but what was wrong with the Guide writing the Sentinel a check?

“It’s kind of like how it used to be that any money a married woman had legally belonged to her husband,” Blair said. “You can see the advantages for the man—if he wants to be an asshole, there’s not a whole lot his wife can do about it. Women stopped putting up with that shit around the middle of the nineteenth century, though.” 

Jim shook his head. “Then yeah, I’ll give you your money.” Jesus. “Don’t worry about utilities and stuff like that for the first couple of years,” he added. “Just save it for school and whatever else you need. Once I’m not making more than twice what you are, we’ll come up with something fair for the expenses.” 

“Okay.” Sandburg gave him a hug. “Thanks, Jim.”

“No big deal, Chief,” Jim answered, giving him a pat.

“It really is. Man. It’s huge. D’you think—are we going to be on campus tomorrow?”

“Yeah, to search the dorm room.”

“Maybe we can pick up a course catalog while we’re there. If we’re going to be anywhere near the Admin building, I mean. Their anthro program is decent—I might have gone there for grad school anyway if I hadn’t had to, you know, flee the country. If they take part-time grad students, that would be perfect—if not I can probably find something else, correspondence school or something. I wonder if I could start in the fall? Application deadlines are usually in January, but it might be different for part-time students. But even if I have to wait a whole year, that would still be great. What if they won’t transfer my credits from Spain? I might have to start over—well, they should accept the MA, so I’d only have to repeat a couple years of coursework; that would be doable.”

At least now Sandburg had something new to worry about. “We can look into all that tomorrow on our lunch break,” Jim promised. “You want to think about getting to sleep now?”

“Oh, sure, right.” Blair flopped over onto his side, taking Jim with him. “I wonder if any of my old professors from undergrad still remember me? I’m going to need letters of recommendation—well, I can probably get them from Spain, once I explain how it wasn’t my fault I just completely disappeared in the middle of the semester with no warning. I hope they understand, anyway. It’s really not good, skipping out when they’re counting on you to teach classes and everything. I was only supposed to be away for four days. Plus the flight back on Saturday. I wonder if anybody ever found out what happened? Boy will they be surprised….”

Jim was pretty sure that Sandburg was still yammering when he fell asleep.

He was definitely at it again—surely not _still_?—when Jim woke up. “—library card. Do you think we could do that? I could start looking into this Bonding thing—I really want to know what’s up with that, don’t you? Jim? Are you awake?”

Jim buried his nose in the back of Sandburg’s neck. He couldn’t smother anybody who smelled that good. It would be wrong. It would also be wrong to smother someone who was curled trustingly against his chest, or the owner of the sweet little ass that was nestled against his cock. Even if he was chattering like a monkey at who-knows-how-early in the morning. “Chief?”

Blair twisted around in his arms. Now Jim’s erection was pressing against his hip. He was definitely going to notice that, and Jim was pretty sure it would spook him. “Yeah?”

“Shaddup.”

“Sure thing, Jim.”

But when he finally stopped talking, Jim heard his alarm clock playing upstairs. “Oh, shit.” He threw the blankets back. “How long has that been going off?”

Sandburg shrugged. “A while. I tried to wake you up.”

“Great.” Jim decided not to point out that if he hadn’t had his hearing turned down to block out the Sandburg-chatter, he would have heard the alarm clock on his own. Now he had a bigger problem to work out—since he was in just his underwear, his erection was going to be pretty damn obvious once he got out from under the covers.

When Blair got out of bed and stretched his arms above his head, the front of his sweatpants pulled tight across his crotch. Well, at least Jim wasn’t the only one with that particular problem. He got his robe untangled and belted it securely around himself as soon as he stood up.

“So what do you think? About the library,” Sandburg added.

“Yeah, fine, whatever. We’ve got to get moving.”

Giving Sandburg showers had just about stopped being awkward, but doing it when they both had hard-ons was a whole different story. If this was going to be an ongoing problem, maybe he should invest in a sponge on a stick. For now, he decided to just ignore it. Pretend it wasn’t happening. 

Except it seemed kind of mean to leave Blair hanging like that. It wasn’t like he could give himself a thumb-job. But what was the alternative? Just say, “Want a hand with that?”

No. That wasn’t something you could just _say_ , not when you had an autopsy to be at in less than an hour. “Want me to run some cold water on that, Chief?” he asked, indicating Blair’s lower body with the washcloth. 

Sandburg gave him a look of mixed exasperation and embarrassment. “No. Thanks.” 

#

Jim was probably in the shower jerking off with his two good hands, Blair thought bitterly, as he sat at the table and waited for Jim to come out and give him breakfast. _Cold water on that_? Bastard.

It was probably Jim’s fault anyway. If they were picking up on each other’s emotions—well, even if it just came from waking up snuggled up to a hot, half-naked man, it was _still_ Jim’s fault. He should have put some pants on, before he came down to—

\--comfort Blair when he was crying. Right. 

Okay, maybe not so much his fault. Still, when Jim came out of the bathroom, Blair’s glanced involuntarily at the crotch of his slacks. Okay, so he hadn’t been jerking off. Maybe he should have—maybe if Jim took care of his own hard-on, Blair’s would go away, too. 

Probably it didn’t work that way, but now they were never going to know.

Well, maybe not never. 

Jim was putting some slices of bread in the toaster. “Do you want anything else, Chief? We have that autopsy first thing.”

He had almost forgotten about that. Well, if the problem hadn’t gone away by then, that would do it, anyway. “Toast is good.” 

“I really am sorry about this Bonding thing,” Jim said as they crunched their way through a couple of slices of toast. 

“I’m pretty sure it’s not your fault,” Blair said. Actually, the more he thought about it, the more he thought _he_ must have done it, somehow. Subconsciously. He had been afraid that Jim would decide he didn’t want to keep him, would send him back to G-TAC. Now he couldn’t, even if he wanted to. Jim was as stuck as he was. 

“I know it’s not. You want any more coffee?” Blair shook his head. “Just about the first thing you ever said to me was that you didn’t want to Bond,” Jim continued. “And I wasn’t going to pressure you about it.”

“I know.” He had been impressed, even then, by the way the big Sentinel had just flat-out agreed to his demands. “I appreciate that. It’ll be all right,” he added, with more confidence than he really felt. “I was pretty out of my head that day.” He couldn’t say that he hadn’t meant it—he had—but the fact that Jim had at least treated his opinion like it mattered made a difference. “The other Sentinels G-TAC gave me to weren’t so great, and I was—it was bad. This is better. I’m okay with it.” 

“Okay. So we’re okay.”

“We’re okay,” Blair agreed. He was reminded of something his mother used to say—forgive in the moment, then go home and figure out how. Jim hadn’t done anything Blair needed to forgive him for, and he was sure they were going to be okay—he just wasn’t completely sure how. 

#

“Is there, uh, a tradition about throwing up at your first autopsy?” Blair asked Jim as Dr. Ling and her assistants readied the body and their instruments.

“Yes,” Dr. Ling said, before Jim could answer. “If you have to, do it in the sink.” 

“Great.” Blair looked around for the sink.

“Right behind you, Chief,” Jim said. Blair had applied some Vicks ahead of time, and he looked all right, really. “If you need to step outside for a minute, just say so.”

Sandburg nodded. “Okay. Thanks. I’ll be okay.”

When Dr. Ling announced that she was ready to start, Blair held out his arm, and they linked up. 

Jim had solid control of his senses on his own, but linking up with Sandburg was something else entirely. It was like the first time he had used his senses consciously—everything snapped into sharp focus. Especially Sandburg. Jim could feel every individual pore on the forearm he held, could hear his blood thrumming through his veins, could see each hair on his head, down to the oval shape of the shafts that signaled that when it grew out, his hair would be curly. 

Jim tore his attention away from his Guide and focused on the body on the slab. As Dr. Ling began the external examination, Jim drew her attention to some skin cells under the nails, to the nearly-invisible indentations left by the killer’s fingers on her wrists and neck. 

“I’m so not watching this part,” Blair said as Dr. Ling picked up a scalpel and started the Y-incision. 

“You don’t have to,” Jim assured him, adjusting his grip on Blair’s forearm as Blair edged around behind him and rested his forehead on Jim’s shoulder. Jim had to watch, though, as Dr. Ling examined each of the dead girl’s organs. 

“Stomach contents look like—coffee and some kind of pastry, eaten approximately two hours before death,” Dr. Ling reported. 

That meant Annie had made it as far as the coffee shop before she was attacked, Jim noted. Maybe she had met the killer there.

“Can you do that microscope thing, like Dr. Temas did?” Blair asked into his shoulder. 

“I don’t think so.” He tried anyway, though, focusing on the sample of stomach contents that one of the ME’s assistants was labeling. He couldn’t quite get down to the microscopic level, but he could get far enough that he didn’t really know what he was looking at. “We might want to practice that.”

“Cool.”

Even though Jim could feel Sandburg’s distress through their link, he made several more helpful suggestions throughout the autopsy, addressing them all to Jim’s shoulder blade without looking up. 

When Dr. Ling announced she was ready to close, Sandburg pulled away his arm, breaking their link, and allowed Jim to usher him out of the morgue. “Okay,” Blair said. “That wasn’t too bad.”

“You did good,” Jim confirmed. 

“You too.”

Jim smiled. “Thanks.”

They stopped by the courthouse and picked up a warrant for Mark Cahill’s dorm room, then headed to campus to execute it, meeting a team of uniformed officers there. Cahill’s roommate was pre-law, and spent several minutes reminding them that they had no right to search his side of the room—but Jim didn’t have to. In Cahill’s desk he found a notebook that contained both math notes and a stalker’s diary, listing details such as what Annie had worn to class each day, what brands of bottled water and flavors of fruit juice she drank, and what classmates she talked to. And in the drop ceiling above Cahill’s bunk, he found a pink baseball cap that smelled of both the victim and of damp sea air. A trophy. 

“Notify the DA as soon as you have those logged in to evidence,” Jim told the uniforms. “Should be more than enough to get a DNA warrant.” Once they were back in the truck, he said to Sandburg, “We have to be back at the station at two—Simon’s meeting with the girl’s parents, and he wants me there. That gives us two hours to get some lunch and then get started on your stuff. I think we should do lunch first, if you’re recovered from this morning.”

“I am,” Blair said. “Let me think—oh, there used to be a great Ethiopian place just off campus, over that way.”

Jim started off in the direction he’d indicated before Blair’s words really sank in. “Does this place actually have _food_?”

“Yes, Jim, it’s a restaurant.”

“All I know about Ethiopian food is that they don’t have much of it.”

“They’ve had some famines, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a thriving national cuisine. Trust me, you’ll love it.”

Jim had his doubts about that, but decided to go along with it. Sandburg was the one they had to work at packing weight on; if he hated the food himself, he’d just hit a drive through on the way back the station, or skip lunch if there wasn’t time. 

He was surprised to find that the restaurant was still in operation, and that it seemed to be doing a pretty good business. The hostess announced a short wait for a table in the ‘Western section.’ Jim was confused for a moment—the restaurant seemed to be oriented north-south—until Sandburg said, “The traditional section will be fine—if that’s okay with you, Jim?”

Jim agreed, but regretted it when he saw that in the “traditional section,” the tables were as low as coffee tables, and everyone was sitting on low stools just a few inches from the floor. _Play along_ , he reminded himself. 

“What do you like?” Blair asked, looking over the menu. “The _tibs wat_ is good. Or the _doro tibs_.”

“Is there anything on here that’s not spicy, Chief?” Jim asked.

“Oh…maybe we’ll skip the _tibs_ , this time, then. How about _minchetabesh_?”

Jim had no idea what that was. “Okay.”

When the waitress came, Blair ordered for both of them—the minch-whatever it was and two other things. Jim decided not to worry about it. If he didn’t want his share, they could take it home and Blair could eat it later. 

“So you used to come here a lot?”

“Oh, yeah, whenever I could get someone to pay for it,” Blair nodded. “The dining halls are—well, they let you have as much as you want, which is great, but the food’s not very adventurous. Especially if you’re trying to be vegetarian, which freshman year I was. Up until winter break, anyway.” 

“Is there a story about that?” Jim wondered.

“Not really. I didn’t find out until November that they kick you out of the dorms over the holidays, so I had to wangle an invitation to go home with my roommate. The first night, we got there right at dinner time, and his mom put this enormous roast chicken in the middle of the table.” Blair gestured, suggesting a chicken approximately the size of a Labrador retriever. “I’d never seen anything like it. A lot of the places I grew up, that would be like sitting down and carving up a roast baby, you know?” 

Jim didn’t, in fact, know, but before he could say so, Blair had gone on, “And before I could say anything, the mom started making up plates for everybody, and she gave me this enormous drumstick. So I had this ethical dilemma—I could eat the dead animal, or I could be rude to somebody who was giving me free food and a roof over my head. I wasn’t raised to do either of those things, you know? I stalled for a while, but his mom kept asking me if I liked the food, and would I rather have some of the white meat…so I ended up eating the drumstick, and it was _delicious_. It was a great anthropological experience, actually. If you’re out doing field work, it’s pretty likely someone will invite you over to dinner, and they’ll serve you something that you think is weird, but they think you ought to be honored they gave you.”

“Where the hell did you grow up that a chicken leg is weird?” Jim managed to ask when Blair paused for breath.

“Oh, all over the place. Communes, ashrams, the occasional cult—I was born and raised in the counter-culture. Spending two weeks at my roommate’s parents’ house was like being dropped onto another planet, or a museum exhibit—suburban squares in their natural habitat. It was a real trip.”

Jim was still working on a follow-up question—for instance, what the hell did he mean “the occasional cult”?—when the waitress came and placed a large plate on the table between them, laden with three piles of…stuff, plus some lettuce, tomatoes, and boiled egg slices. There was a large tortilla-like thing between the plate and the other food, and more pieces of the tortilla-thing around the edges. He waited to see what was going to happen next, but the waitress just said, “Enjoy your meals,” and walked away.

“In the traditional room, you get a communal plate,” Blair explained. “Cool, huh?”

Looking around, Jim noticed that all of the other tables had the same arrangement, and that everyone was scooping up their piles of…stuff with pieces of the flat bread that accompanied the main dishes. A quick check of the table confirmed that there were no utensils other than the bread. Taking a deep breath, he reminded himself that he was _going along_ and that there was a drive-through in his future. “Okay, what am I looking at here?”

“That’s the _minchetabesh_ ,” Blair said, indicating a pile that looked sort of like taco meat. “Minced beef with seasonings. And that one’s beans with vegetables and spices, and that one’s lentils with, uh, vegetables and spices. You can start anywhere.”

Awkwardly, Jim scooped up some of the meat with a piece of bread and held it out in Blair’s direction. When Blair bit into the bread, it flopped over and dropped half of the meat back onto their plate. “Here,” he said, once he’d swallowed. “Do it like—like they’re doing, over there.” He pointed with his chin, and Jim watched out of the corner of his eye as one of the women at a nearby table tore of a strip of bread, used it to roll up a morsel of food from their communal plate, and popped it in her lunch companion’s mouth. As she chewed and swallowed, the other woman repeated the favor.

“I guess that’s traditional, too?” Jim asked, copying what the women had done. 

“Uh-huh. It’s called _goorsha_. It’s a friendship ritual.”

“I see.” Now Sandburg’s choice of restaurant made sense. Hand-feeding Sandburg at home had—as Sandburg had predicted—come to seem normal, but it didn’t take a huge mental leap to guess that even he might have some faint sense of embarrassment about it in public. 

“Aren’t you going to have some?” Blair asked after Jim had fed him several bites of each dish. 

“I don’t know, Chief,” he said dubiously. The food smelled…weird, and if it was the non-spicy option, Jim didn’t want to think about what the spicy dishes might be like.

“Sentinels in Ethiopia eat this stuff all the time,” Sandburg pointed out. “It’s not like they all live on Wonder bread and mayonnaise.”

“I eat plenty of things that aren’t Wonder bread and mayonnaise,” Jim objected.

“Yeah, and this could be one of them. Just try it—if you don’t like it, I’ll stop bugging you.”

Jim had to admit, Sandburg knew how to make an offer he couldn’t refuse. He used a fairly large piece of the bread to serve himself a very small morsel of the beef. 

At first, he just tasted the sour, almost fermented flavor of the bread, but once he bit through it, spices exploded across his tongue, sending him coughing and reaching for his water glass. 

“Easy,” Sandburg said. “Take your time; taste it. Don’t just panic because it has a flavor.” 

Jim’s first impulse was to deny that that was what he was doing—he was a Sentinel and a police detective, he didn’t _panic_.

“You can handle intense sensory input with your other senses just fine,” Blair continued. “This isn’t any different. It’s not like you go around avoiding looking at bright colors because it might be too much for you.”

Sandburg had a point. The Army had taught him to use his other senses effectively; probably the only reason they hadn’t bothered with taste was that it didn’t have any military applications. 

As a kid, he’d learned to enjoy music, rather than be overwhelmed by it, by breaking the sound down into its different parts, identifying them, and only then allowing them to combine again in his head. The same thing ought to work here. 

He tried it. He tasted beef, ginger, onion, pepper—then several other things he couldn’t put a name to, but that he could separate out and taste individually. It took him a moment to figure out the mental trick that let the flavors come back together, but when they did—“That is pretty good.”

Blair sat back, looking like the cat that ate the canary. “See?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jim said, stuffing more of the food into Sandburg’s mouth, to shut him up.

After drinking three tiny cups each of honey-sweetened coffee, they left the restaurant. At the admin building, where Sandburg asked for, and received, a course catalogue roughly the size of a telephone book, along with several smaller booklets containing the application and the fall course schedule. 

“Where to now?” Jim asked, taking the materials that Blair was awkwardly trying to carry clamped between his casts.

“Library, I guess. Oh, except can we walk through Hargrove? That’s where the anthropology department is. I can check out who’s still here, and what they have on their doors.” 

Jim checked his watch. “We only have about half an hour before we have to head back to the station.”

“Plenty of time,” Blair assured him. 

They happened to reach Hargrove just as a class period was ending, and a couple hundred students surged through the old building’s narrow halls. Suddenly anxious, Jim tucked Sandburg against his side and ducked into a defensible position in an alcove with a fire extinguisher. Sandburg looked at him wide-eyed, but didn’t protest. Maybe the crowd made him nervous, too. 

In just a few minutes, though, the classrooms filled and the hallways cleared. “Okay,” Sandburg said. “Most of the offices are upstairs.”

Upstairs, Sandburg wandered happily from door to door, occasionally muttering, “She’s new,” or “Wonder if he’s gone, or has a new office?” or calling Jim over to look at a particularly amusing _New Yorker_ cartoon. Most of the offices were empty, the doors shut and locked, but a few stood ajar, and inside these Jim could hear typing, the slow turn of pages, and other soft sounds.

At one of these, Blair said, “Oh, wow!” and knocked with his cast.

A man inside said, “Yes?”

Blair pushed the door open. “Hey, Dr. Stoddard—remember me?”

Jim lingered a few feet away, giving Sandburg some privacy. The other man—Stoddard—hesitated for a moment before he said, “Blair _Sandburg_? What in heaven’s name are you doing back in the States?”

“Long story,” Blair said, ambling into the office, where a whisper of fabric-on-fabric suggested he was sitting down. “How are you? Did you get the new book published?”

“I did, finally—it came out about a year ago.”

“I’ll have to look for it.”

“The library here has it, of course—are you going to be in the country long?”

“Oh, yeah. I got picked up by the draft board when I came back for SCA in Charleston two summers back.”

“My goodness. So you’re--”

“Working for the Cascade Police Department,” Blair said dryly. “Yeah. That’s actually why I’m on campus today—I don’t know if you heard, about that undergrad who was--”

“Yes, it was in the paper. Terrible thing. She wasn’t in any of my classes, though.”

“Oh, I know. I’m on a break.” 

After a moment, Stoddard said, “I read your IJSA article—brilliant piece of work. Not that I’d expect anything else.” 

“Thanks—IJSA? They ran that?”

“You didn’t know?”

“No—man, I submitted that right before—right before SCA. Good thing they didn’t ask for a rewrite, I guess. Man.” 

“It created quite a stir in the letters section. Let me see if I have those issues.” Jim heard Stoddard stand up and shift books around on shelves. “Here it is—your paper was in the Winter issue year before last, and then there are letters about it in the next two.” 

“Awesome. Can I borrow these?”

“Of course.” 

“Thanks.” 

Stoddard sat down again, saying ruefully, “The police department. This is such a waste, Blair.”

“I know. I know. But hey, I am going to finish the doctorate. Here, if I can.”

“You are? When do you start back?”

“Don’t know. I haven’t applied yet.”

“I’m afraid you’ve missed the deadline for fall admission.”

“I figured. Back in December I was—well, like I said, it’s a long story.”

“Let me look into it for you,” Stoddard suggested. “There might be something we can do.”

“Hey, that would be great. It’s going to have to be part-time anyway, and I don’t need funding, so….”

“I’m sure we can come up with something. There are seats left in my ethnology seminar—if nothing else, you could just come to that, and we’ll figure out a way to get you credit for it later. Let’s see—you have your MA already, of course—what doctoral level coursework have you done?”

Sandburg started rattling off course titles. “I’m a little behind on course work, actually, because I keep going on expeditions—there’s the Ghana one you know about, plus I’ve done Chile, Peru, Borneo, New Zealand.”

They talked for a while about that; Jim recognized some of the stories Blair had already told him, although these versions had a higher level of technical detail and were presented with less background information. 

Jim hated to interrupt when it seemed like his Guide was having fun, but eventually, he had to. Tapping on the door, he said, “Chief? We have to get back to the station.” He hoped Blair didn’t object—he didn’t want to fight about it, especially in front of someone Sandburg obviously liked and respected, but he also wasn’t anywhere close to feeling comfortable leaving Blair in a strange place with someone Jim didn’t know. 

Sandburg glanced at a clock on Stoddard’s desk. “Oh, shit. Sorry, professor. I was going to go to the library….”

“We’ll have to do it tomorrow,” Jim said. “Or after work, if they’re still open.” As Blair got to his feet, Jim relieved him of the anthropology journals he was trying to hold on to, and added them to the stack of other things he was carrying for Blair. “Nice to meet you,” he added to the professor. “Jim Ellison.”

“Eli Stoddard. I take it you’re Blair’s….”

“Yeah, he’s my Sentinel,” Blair confirmed. Jim liked the way the words sounded. _My Sentinel._

“I was one of his professors when he was a student here,” Stoddard said, looking at Jim as if he wasn’t sure whether to disapprove of him or not. “One of the most brilliant students I’ve ever had.”

“I know,” Jim said. “I mean, not that, but I know he’s pretty special.” 

“It’s a real loss to the field, him having to leave academia.”

“It’s not his fault,” Blair spoke up. “Anyway, we’re going to work it out so I can finish the degree. We really do have to get going,” he added with a glance up at Jim. “That dead girl’s parents are coming to the station—maybe we can get together for coffee or something, sometime?”

“Sure.”

“Let me give you our number,” Blair continued, and Jim took out one of his cards and wrote their home number on the back. 

“I’ll find out what we can do about the fall, and get in touch.”

“Okay—thanks!” As they left the building, Sandburg burbled, “That’s perfect—Dr. Stoddard’s a full professor, tenure and everything, so if he’s helping me get back in, I’m a shoo-in. Clear sailing. He’s a great guy. And he read my IJSA paper! Man, I wonder what everybody said about it?” He paused to look at the journals tucked under Jim’s arm, as if trying to see through the covers. 

“You can check it out while I’m talking to Annie’s parents,” Jim said.

“Hm? But I….”

“I won’t be using my senses for this one,” Jim explained. “Later, yeah, there’ll be times when I want you in on stuff like this—like when the next of kin is also a suspect. Talking to parents of a dead child is always rough, and this is going to be a pretty bad one—a young woman, sexually assaulted, and they’ve been worrying about her for weeks since she went missing. I’d just as soon not put you through it, and unlike the crime scene and the autopsy, there’s no good reason I have to.”

Sandburg’s face took on a stubborn look, and Jim could see him gearing up to argue about it. All it took to make the kid willing to go to the mat to defend his ability to do something was tell him he didn’t have to do it. 

Jim added, “It’s better for them, too, if I can focus on them instead of on how you’re coping—and no matter how many times you tell me you’ll be just fine, if you’re in the room, I’m going to be paying as much attention to you as I am to them.”

Sandburg took a deep breath and nodded. “Okay. Fair enough. I want to learn everything, but I can start with one that’s not as fraught.”

“Deal.”

They reached the station with just enough time for Jim to settle Blair at his desk and take off his shoes before Annie’s parents arrived. A uniformed officer escorted them to Simon’s office, and Jim slipped in behind them. 

“Mr. and Mrs. Wallace, the first thing I’d like to say is that I’m so, so sorry for your loss,” Simon began. “I have a boy of my own, and I just can’t imagine. This is Jim Ellison, the lead detective on your daughter’s case.”

With a last glance at Blair, Jim shut the door behind him, and got on with telling the grieving parents about the progress he’d made with their daughter’s case.

#

Blair found himself shaking a little as the door closed behind Jim and the dead girl’s parents. He could almost feel the grief and anger pouring off of them—or _could_ he feel it? A lot of cultures believed that Bonding increased a Guide’s empathic abilities, so that the Guide could pick up on the feelings of “normals” as well as Sentinels. 

Jim was so right, he did _not_ need to be in that room. 

He tried to turn his attention to the IJSA issues in front of him. Jim had opened them all to the first pages of his article and of the letters sections, propping them open with staplers and other things from the desk, so Blair didn’t have to fumble with them. 

But his mind kept going back to the couple in Simon’s office. They had just gotten the worst news that a parent could possibly get. Would it help to know that their daughter’s killer was going to be brought to justice? Or wouldn’t that matter at all, in the face of their loss?

He didn’t have kids of his own, and it was clear that now he never would, but if Naomi—

Oh, shit. Did Naomi have any idea where he was, or if he was alive or dead? He had no idea if G-TAC would have even tried to notify her—and even if they had tried, there was a good chance they hadn’t succeeded. It might have taken a couple of months for her to notice that she hadn’t spoken to him in a while, and probably a couple more before she got worried enough to do more than periodically try his old phone number, but by now she had to have figured out that something was wrong. 

#

“How’d it go?” Blair asked, when Jim returned from escorting the Wallaces to their rental car and directing them to the courthouse, where they’d meet with the ADA. 

“Fine,” Jim said. “What’s wrong, Chief?” Sandburg seemed unusually on edge.

“I just realized, when you were in there—I need to find some way to let my mom know I’m okay.”

It was the first time Blair had mentioned either of his parents directly; Jim had half-assumed that they were deceased. “Call her,” Jim suggested, pointing towards the phone. 

“It’s not that easy. She never sticks in one place for long—even if I still had the number where she was a year and a half ago, she wouldn’t be there now. We’ve, you know, we’ve kind of been going our separate ways for the last ten years, but we do check in every couple of months. She’s got to be really worried.” Sandburg was practically vibrating, looking like he wanted to go off in all directions at once.

“Okay. We’ll track her down,” Jim promised. They had the full resources of a major city police department at their disposal; it couldn’t be too hard. “Would she have filed a missing person’s report?” he asked, bringing up the Missing Persons database on his computer

“Good question—probably not, she really doesn’t trust cops. If she did, it would probably be in Spain.”

“Oh, right.” Jim typed Blair’s name into the database anyway, but he wasn’t surprised not to find anything. “Let me ask Missing Persons how we can check that.” There had to be an international database, but it wasn’t something he used regularly. 

Missing Persons didn’t find anything, either, but suggested that he call Interpol and the police department in Barcelona. Jim left messages at both of those places, then thought about what else he could try.

“Motor vehicles,” he decided. “Does she have a driver’s license?”

“Yeah—they aren’t going to have anything up-to-date, though. When hers expires and she eventually gets around to renewing it, she just does it with the address for wherever she’s staying at the time.”

“We might be able to backtrack from that, though—if they know where she was going next, and so on.” Jim tried the Washington State DMV first.

“Yeah, see, that’s an old license she got using my campus address,” Blair said when a record came up on the screen. “We know that’s a dead end.”

“What other states has she registered in?”

“Which ones hasn’t she? California, New Mexico, and New York are probably the places to start. Oh, and she has those friends with sustainable farm in Vermont. She might have used their address.”

Searching those states, Jim found three more old drivers licenses, but nothing current, and the number attached to the only one more recent than Blair’s college address proved to be disconnected. “Do you have a number for the Vermont farmers?”

Blair shook his head. “I don’t even know their name. The name of the farm has something about Aquarius in it, but that might not even be anything official.”

“Okay. How about this?” He started a search for open warrants.

“My mother isn’t a _criminal_ ,” Sandburg protested.

“Does she ever get a speeding ticket?”

“Well…maybe. And she does get arrested at protests and stuff, once in a while.”

“There you go. If she got a ticket and didn’t pay it, or skipped the hearing, there could be a warrant out on her.” 

There wasn’t, though. Jim turned to arrest records. Naomi Sandburg had a smattering of arrests in Washington state, but nothing recent. The offenses were things like resisting arrest, failure to disperse, and marching without a permit, so Jim supposed Blair was right about the extent of his mother’s illegal activities. 

“That must have been the WTO protest,” Blair said, pointing his cast at the computer screen. “I didn’t know she went to that. Man, she was lucky to get arrested on the first day of that one—it got pretty hairy. She’d have been safely in jail by the time the pi—before the part with the tear gas and rubber bullets.” 

Jim decided to start in on arrest records in other states. Finally he found a recent arrest—less than a year ago—in Washington DC. 

“Failure to disperse and resisting arrest,” Blair read from the screen. “Can you get the details?”

Jim clicked to bring up the full report. 

“That’s G-TAC’s national office,” Blair said when he saw the address. 

“Maybe she does know what happened to you,” Jim suggested.

“Maybe, maybe not. She’s protested the draft before.”

Jim found the phone number she’d given the arresting officer and dialed it, helping Blair wedge the receiver between his shoulder and his ear. He turned up his hearing enough that he could hear what was being said on the other end, promising himself that if it did turn out that Blair’s mother was there, he’d stop eavesdropping and give them some privacy.

The phone was answered, “Peaceful Garden, delivery or takeout?”

“Oh.” Blair said something in an Asian language—Chinese, at a guess—in which the only words Jim could make out were “Naomi Sandburg.” The restaurant employee answered with what Jim could identify as an apologetic negative, even without understanding the words. Blair responded with, “thanks anyway,” in English.

Jim took the phone back.

“Chinese restaurant. She probably had the menu in her purse or something. She does that.” 

Jim checked the address on the police report—it matched up with the most recent driver’s license they had found. Another dead end. 

“Maybe…is there some way we can get a list of who else was arrested at that protest?” Blair asked. “She would have been with a group.”

There wasn’t any way to do that through the database, but Jim got on the phone to the precinct listed on the report and prepared to beg. “This is Jim Ellison with the Cascade police department. We’re trying to track down a woman you arrested last year….”

The arresting officer confirmed that Ms. Sandburg had given a false address, and that they had no other information that might help find her. “We could issue a warrant for giving false information, if that would help you,” she suggested.

Jim didn’t think Blair would like that idea much. “Not right now. It’s for a…next of kin notification,” he explained, which was true enough. “We might be able to track her down through known associates. Is there any way you can put together a list of people who were arrested at the same protest?”

“Our database isn’t set up to produce something like that. I’d have to go through the records manually.”

“I’d really appreciate it. She’s—her son’s been missing for a while.” 

“I’ll see what I can do. You have a fax number?”

Jim supplied it. “Thanks for all your help.”

“I’ll try to have it out to you tomorrow or the next day, if we don’t get too busy here.”

Hanging up, Jim reported his progress to Blair, passing along the idea about issuing a warrant. “If nothing else works, we could do that, or issue a person of interest warrant ourselves—it might take some time, but if she tried to get on an airplane or cross a border, or she got picked up for something, we’d find out about it.”

“Oh, man, she’d _freak_ ,” Blair said. “It would probably be better to just call every intentional community, spiritual healing center, and head shop in the country and ask them to put up flyers. Eventually _someone_ would see them who knows where she is.”

Jim thought about the amount of work that would entail. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

#

In the end, they had to leave the station with no solid leads on Naomi’s whereabouts. Blair felt an irrational sense of urgency—he hadn’t worried too much about Naomi during the last year and a half, when he would have been unable to try to contact her anyway, and for the last three weeks he simply hadn’t thought of it, but now that he had remembered, he was anxious to reach her. Naomi wasn’t exactly June Cleaver, but she loved him, and not knowing where he was or if he was okay had to be hard on her.

At the same time, he was touched by how quickly Jim had sprung into action. He’d put in several solid hours of work, not once mentioning that he may have had other things to do, or pointing out that if Naomi was just a little bit more normal and responsible, they wouldn’t have to go to so much trouble.

He did manage to settle down enough to start reading his IJSA issues while Jim fixed dinner. His paper was—if he did say so himself—even more brilliant than he remembered, and the letters responding to it were satisfying: several hidebound old idiots calling him “immature” and “appealing purely to shock value,” and castigating the IJSA editors for giving space to his flights of fancy, and then in the next issue, several more letters defending him from his detractors. There were several other interesting-looking articles in there, too: one about Sentinels in ancient Welsh mythology, which he marked to read next, and a few about other topics he had a less consuming interest in. 

“Do I get to read your article?” Jim asked as he brought over two plates of fish, rice, and vegetables.

“You want to?” Blair asked, surprised. “Sure. I mean, it’s not that interesting, if you aren’t an anthropologist.”

“I’m interested in what you do.”

“Seriously, Naomi doesn’t read my publications anymore. My first one, she tried, but….” He noticed that Jim’s expression had grown disapproving. “Hey, she’s a good mother. I’m sure your mother—has a telephone, and a fixed address and everything, but there’s nothing wrong with mine. She’s a great person.”

“I don’t know where my mom is either, Chief.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

Jim waved off his apology. “It’s fine. She took off when we—my brother and me—were kids. Left us with our dad and the housekeeper.”

“She didn’t visit or anything?”

“Once, when I was nine. She—didn’t like our dad much.”

“Still, she shouldn’t take that out on the kids.”

Jim shrugged. “What about your dad? Passed away?”

Blair shook his head. “Well, maybe. No idea. I was conceived during a two-week music festival. There are about ten possible candidates, including two members of headlining acts.” He shrugged. “It was 1969.” 

Jim very pointedly did not say anything. Blair decided to accept that. He wasn’t this least bit ashamed of not knowing who his father was—he hadn’t had any idea that anyone would think it might be something to _be_ ashamed of, until that first Christmas break of college, when his roommate’s father had asked what his father did. He’d explained, the same way his mother always did when someone asked. Later, his roommate had said, “Dude, no offense, but your mom’s a whore!”

“Anyway, we didn’t need him,” Blair continued, “whoever he was. I had a great childhood.” Different, definitely—but he hadn’t realized how weird it was until he got to college and started meeting people who had lived in the same house for their entire lives, and hadn’t even shared it with anyone outside the immediate family. 

“Glad to hear it.”

“It was. Great.” 

“Well, sometimes I missed having a mom.”

Blair shrugged. “Can’t really miss what you never had. Anyway, there were always guys around—her boyfriends, friends of friends. I mean, it wasn’t like I didn’t have anybody to teach me how to shave and throw a ball.”

“That’s good, Chief. And we’ll find your mom. It might take a while, but if we keep at it, she’ll turn up.”

He nodded. “If I ever get my address book back from G-TAC, I can call around to people she knows, get the word out. I’m fine; I’m just worried about her, worrying about me.” She wasn’t the type of mother that would worry about every little thing—whether he was eating enough and wearing a hat in the winter—but being missing for over a year, that was a big thing.

“I’ll have to call G-TAC about that again; they haven’t gotten back to me.”

After dinner, Jim settled down on the couch with Blair’s IJSA article. Blair sat next to him, close enough to look over his shoulder and see how he was making out with it. 

“Hm?” Jim glanced over at him curiously. “Oh.” Putting his arm around Blair’s shoulders, he pulled him in close.

That was new. New, but okay, he decided. Jim was warm, solid, and very comforting to lean against. Blair rested his head against Jim’s shoulder and cuddled in. 

He’d meant to read along as Jim read—or read from one of the other issues, if Jim objected to having Blair plastered up along his side—but he’d had a long day, and Jim’s warmth and affection was soothing. 

It was because they were Bonded, Blair knew. Jim was happy and comfortable, so he was happy and comfortable. He could fight it if he wanted to—could make himself feel some other way—but just for a little while, it was nice to let himself simply drift along in the big Sentinel’s wake. At some point, he drifted straight into sleep. When he woke, the journal lay forgotten on Jim’s other side, and Jim was looking down at him fondly. 

And—this was getting to be a pattern—they were both hard. He definitely was, and somehow he knew that this was something else he was sharing with Jim. A glance confirmed it. 

That morning, there had been a lot of good reasons not to say or do anything about it—starting with how they hadn’t had that talk yet, and ending with how they were running late for work. Now, though, those concerns seemed—or actually were—irrelevant. He maneuvered his right hand into Jim’s crotch, stroking along his cock with his thumb.

“Hey—what are you doing?”

“What’s it look like?”

Jim caught his wrist and moved his hand. “You don’t have to do that, Chief.”

“You want to,” Blair pointed out. And Jim did guys. What was the problem?

“I’m not going to take advantage of you when you’re--” Jim gestured sharply with his free hand. “Take advantage of you.”

Blair sat up, putting an inch or two between himself and Jim. He needed a clear head for this. “ _What_?”

“I hope we can—someday, I mean—that we can--” Jim’s voice dropped almost out of audible range, “— _you know_ , but I can wait until you’re ready. As long as it takes, no hurry. You’re my Guide, Chief, and--”

“You’re completely fucking insane,” Blair realized. 

“ _I’m_ completely insane?” Jim asked. “That--” he gestured toward his groin “—was a pass. No way are you saying it wasn’t.”

“Of course it was. In what sick world do you get from me _grabbing your cock_ to thinking you’re taking advantage of me? Lunatic.”

“You’re in a very vulnerable position, and--”

“Jesus. You honestly think if you were _taking advantage of me_ I wouldn’t _stop_ you?”

Jim looked over at him. “How?”

“I’d start by saying _stop_. And that would work, because you’re not an asshole. Jesus,” Blair said again. “Have we met? I mean, yeah, you could maybe take me if you tried—and I know as well as you do that you wouldn’t—but if you did, you would fucking _know_. There would be no ambiguity about exactly what was going on.”

“Okay,” Jim said. “Okay. Fine. Excuse me for trying to be considerate of your feelings.”

“The considerate thing to do for a man with no hands is _give him a handjob_.” Not that he was at all sure he wanted a handjob from a guy who had just demonstrated he had more hang-ups than a walk-in closet. 

“I can do that, if you want. I’m not going to make you do anything for me.”

Blair thumped his head against the back of the sofa. “Am I speaking English? Did I stutter? You are not _making me_ do anything.”

“So—you want to,” Jim said, slowly catching up.

“Well, I did. Before you started _insulting_ me. What, you think I notice you have a hard-on and I just bend over? Because what, I’m scared of you? You think that’s how it works, in my head?”

“No,” Jim muttered. 

“You’d better not. I’ve turned down scarier guys than you. Lots of them.” 

“I believe you,” Jim said meekly. 

Holding his hand out again, he said, “Fine. You want to try this again?” Jim didn’t object, so he lowered his hand, more slowly this time, and stroked his thumb along the fly of Jim’s pants. He’d softened a little during their argument, but quickly firmed up again under Blair’s touch. “You like that?”

“Yeah—Chief, are you _sure_ ….”

“Positive. I guess you’ve been with Guides before?”

“Yeah—a few—can you--”

“Yeah.” He managed to work his hand further down, so he was pressing on Jim’s balls with the fingertips of his cast. “I’ve never done it with a Sentinel. Bet it’ll be fun, though.” Just the thing to take his mind off worrying about his mother, and school, and being Bonded to this guy he was about to have sex with. “I’m doing all the work here—you want to catch up?”

“Um.” Jim reached for his crotch and hesitated. 

“Don’t tell me you don’t know what to do with a cock—you have one,” Blair pointed out, giving it another caress with his thumb. 

“I’m just wondering if we should go upstairs. I don’t want to make a mess on the couch.”

“Seriously? You and this couch, man. Okay.” He patted Jim’s crotch and stood up, taking the lead up the stairs. If they were going to bed, though, he wanted more than a quick grope. Jim would probably be happier with that, too, in the end—even though _Blair_ was more than ready, it seemed like Jim might need some time to get with the program. Blair was willing to give him as much time as he needed, as long as they spent it naked and exploring each other’s bodies. 

One nice thing about wearing clothing that didn’t fasten in any way—even a man with only one functioning digit could get undressed in a hurry. He was entirely naked and sprawled across Jim’s bed by the time Jim was standing at the top of the stairs, unbuttoning his cuffs. 

“C’mon,” Blair said. “You’ve already seen everything I’ve got.” 

Jim blushed. That was just fucking adorable. Blair wanted to see if it went all the way down. 

Unfortunately, the blush had faded by the time Jim got his shirt off. But when he unbuckled his belt and shoved his pants and underwear down, Blair decided not to be disappointed anymore. Jim was an enormous wall of a man, with a nearly-hairless, well-muscled body that could have been sculpted out of marble, and a cock like a fertility god, standing out rock-hard from his groin and glistening wetly at the top. “Oh, yeah,” Blair breathed, wriggling eagerly. “C’mere, big guy.”

Jim came over and sat on the edge of the bed. “You’re gorgeous,” he said, holding out one hand like Blair was a strange dog he wanted to pat. “Can I?”

“Sure.”

Jim’s hand wavered, then stroked over his shoulder. Interesting place to start, but okay. “I’m kind of afraid of hurting you, Chief,” he confessed.

“If you do, I’ll let you know,” Blair assured him. Except for the hands, he was just about healed up, but he still had a few wounds that could sting if he moved the wrong way. “Here.” He got his hands up around Jim’s shoulders and tugged him down with him. 

Not having the use of his hands was a definite disadvantage, but Blair made the best of what he had to work with, exploring Jim with his mouth and thumb. Jim tentatively followed suit, running his hands over Blair’s back and shoulders and mouthing at his neck. 

“So,” Blair asked, licking at one of Jim’s nipples and stroking around his navel with his thumb, “What do you like to do?” He had a feeling Jim would have, given his choice, covered this in an awkward, fully-clothed conversation sitting at the kitchen table. Blair would just as soon figure it out as they went along. He figured talking about it as they went along was a fair compromise.

“Hm? Oh, fishing…”

“I mean in _bed_ , you idiot.”

Jim’s answering smirk suggested that he’d known that, or at least wanted Blair to think he had. “Mostly women,” he admitted. “This is good, though. The only men I’ve been with were….”

“Guides?” Jim nodded. “Yeah, that happens.” He licked his way down Jim’s sternum. “I’ve always gone for both, about fifty-fifty. Well, in terms of desire, anyway. Opportunity has been more like sixty-forty. What have you done with guys?”

“Mostly just blowjobs,” Jim mumbled, and the blush _did_ go the whole way down. Good to know. “Sam, uh, let me fuck him once.”

“Let you?” The word choice was telling. 

“Asked me to, I guess. He seemed to like it,” Jim said dubiously. 

They weren’t going to be doing that for a while, then, Blair figured. It would take a lot of convincing—and possibly a hands-on demonstration—before Jim would accept that being fucked was fun for the guy on the bottom, too. “The blowjobs--did you go down on them?” He figured not—that would explain why he thought of sex like it was some kind of _favor_ Guides did for him. 

“Er--no, they just did me. I’ll, uh, I’ll do you, though,” Jim said bravely. 

“Yeah, you will,” Blair agreed. No way was he having that one-sided shit. “Not until you’re gagging for it, though,” he added, licking his own thumb and stroking it over Jim’s nipple. “This is supposed to be fun.” He nuzzled against Jim’s jaw. “Do you kiss?” If he didn’t, that was another thing that was going to have to change.

“Yeah—yeah, I do that.” Jim turned his head enough to find Blair’s mouth with his. 

Here, at least, Jim wasn’t at all hesitant. His tongue met Blair’s, stroking, exploring. One of his hands cradled the back of Blair’s head, while the other stroked up and down Blair’s arm. “Chief, this is--” He kissed Blair again, instead of finishing. 

“Yeah, Jim?” Blair rolled over onto his back, nudging Jim with his hands to encourage him to roll on top of him and take the lead. 

“Beautiful,” Jim said, stroking his chest. 

One of his fingers brushed against a nipple—probably more or less by accident, Blair thought, and wriggled to get more contact. “Yeah, right there.”

“You like that?” Jim asked, his tone more genuinely curious than teasing. “I didn’t know guys liked that.”

“Don’t you?” Blair asked, flicking first one of Jim’s nipples, then the other, with his thumb. 

“Well, yeah.” He ducked his head to Blair’s chest and licked tentatively at his nipple. 

“Yeah, that’s good—you can bite a little bit, that feels good.”

Jim gave him a skeptical look.

“Like this,” Blair said, and demonstrated a very light nibble. “Don’t, like, chew on it.” 

Jim tried that, while Blair murmured encouragement to him. Jim moved from one nipple to the other without prompting, and then down his belly, copying what Blair had done earlier. “You taste good,” Jim said. “Even better than you smell. How d’you do that?”

“Guide thing,” Blair said, ruffling the short hair at the back of Jim’s neck with his thumb. “We smell good to Sentinels.”

“Sam and Dave didn’t smell this good.” Jim worked his way up Blair’s side, breathing in deeply near his armpit.

“Maybe ‘cause we’re Bonded,” Blair suggested. “Or maybe the other way around—compatibility thing, maybe.” He had a vague memory of reading a paper about Sentinel-Guide sexuality, but he couldn’t call the details to mind at the moment. 

“Maybe you’re just special,” Jim suggested, licking and nibbling his way back down to Blair’s hip.

“Sure, we’ll go with that.”

Jim licked along his iliac crest, eyeing Blair’s cock dubiously. Before Blair could remind him— _gagging for it_ —Jim pounced, planting a quick kiss on the head. He didn’t try to suck, though. Good—Blair had some advice he wanted to give Jim before he tried that. Instead, Jim wrapped one of those long, strong hands around his cock and stroked. Awkwardly at first—Blair thought it was entirely possible that his was the first dick Jim had touched that wasn’t his own. But he hit his stride quickly enough, and brought his other hand in on the action, ghosting across Blair’s belly and tweaking his nipples.

With as long as he’d been waiting for this—all day, or a year and a half, or his whole life—and Jim’s arousal feeding his, he didn’t last long. 

As he caught his breath, Jim dabbled in the puddle of come on his belly. Blair could see him gearing up to taste it, and warned, “That stuff’s really only good fresh.”

“Oh.” Jim got a wad of Kleenex from the box on his bedside table and mopped up the mess with it, then turned onto his own back and took himself in hand. 

“Hey,” Blair objected.

Jim glanced over at him. “It’s okay, I’ve got it.”

So not the point. “I want to help.” The easiest thing, best thing, would be for him to suck Jim off—but maybe Jim didn’t want that, yet. Trading handjobs was about right for their first time, with Jim so worried about “taking advantage,” but Blair didn’t think even he could get a guy off with just one thumb to work with. “Let’s try this.” He covered Jim’s hand with his, so Jim was doing most of the work, but his thumb was along for the ride. 

He wasn’t helping, really, any more than a two-year-old was helping when he stood at the sink and splashed in the water while his mother was washing the dishes, but he felt like he was helping, and when it came to sex, intentions mattered. Jim seemed to like it, too, especially when at the top of every second or third stroke, Blair let his thumb skate over the head of his cock. 

His thumb happened to be in the way when Jim had finally stroked his way to a brisk, efficient orgasm, so Blair quickly popped his thumb in his mouth, to taste Jim’s come while it was still hot. Catching Jim’s eye, he grinned. “You taste good, too.”

Jim smiled back. “Must be a Sentinel thing. We taste good to Guides.”

Once Jim had cleaned up, Blair settled in against him, resting his head on that perfectly sculpted chest. “I’m a lucky, lucky man,” he mused, patting Jim’s belly with one of his casts. 

Jim’s silence gave him plenty of time to think about all the ways that wasn’t true.

“Right this second, I mean,” he clarified.

“Right this second, I am too,” Jim agreed, rubbing Blair’s head. After a while he said sleepily, “It’s barely eight. We should get back up.”

“In a minute,” Blair suggested. 

They slept.

#

 

The problem with going to bed hours earlier than usual was that then Jim woke up in the middle of the night, and had trouble getting back to sleep. This time was no exception. He woke alone in the bed, but with the sheets still cooling from where Blair had left. Extending his senses, he heard the toilet flush downstairs, then Blair padding across the floor and back up the stairs. He closed his eyes, quickly, and Blair tucked himself back up against Jim as if he had never left. 

Within moments Blair was asleep again. Ah, youth. 

Jim propped himself up on his elbow and looked down at his Guide. Blair was completely _not_ his type—he liked long, smooth legs; curvy hips; full breasts. Why, then, was Blair, with his flat, hairy chest and his sturdy, hairy legs, the most amazing thing he had ever seen in his life? Why was jerking off with Blair pressed up against him and brushing Jim’s cock with his thumb better than any sex he could remember?

Sandburg was probably right, that it was the Bond. He didn’t like the idea, though, of reducing his attraction to something so…mechanical.

Blair would point out, though, that the usual things that turned him on were just as mechanical: men were programmed by evolution to be attracted to things that signaled fertility and good health. Jim had heard all about that the other day, when a TV commercial for makeup caught Blair’s attention: reddened lips and cheeks suggested good blood flow to the skin, which usually indicated sexual arousal, and the way women walked in high heeled shoes imitated the gait of a female primate with an estrus swelling (according to Sandburg, anyway). 

The kid did have a way of taking the romance out of anything. From a beautiful woman swaying her hips to a red-assed baboon in one easy step. And Jim—as far gone as he was—wouldn’t have it any other way.

Given what they had done a few hours ago, he should probably stop thinking of Blair as “the kid.” He was twenty-six, and clearly had his share of sexual experience. Jim still wondered, though, if they had rushed things. Hadn’t he just been thinking earlier in the day how telling Blair not to do something only made him more determined to do it? 

Sure, Blair had made the first move, but how enthusiastic had he been before Jim suggested they take it slow?

Enthusiastic enough to make a grab for your cock, his mind supplied. 

He thought back over the events of the previous evening, tamping down the stir of arousal that the memories created. Blair’s heart rate had been elevated, but he smelled only of arousal, not fear or anxiety. His words and movements had been completely confident—and he hadn’t been the least bit shy about letting Jim know what he wanted. 

Now, Blair shifted in his sleep, pressing his ass against Jim’s groin and sighing deeply. 

_Fine_ , Jim thought, gently kissing his Guide’s temple. _You win_.

#

“Is somebody expecting a fax from the DC PD?” Simon’s secretary Rhonda asked. 

“That’s us!” Blair said, raising his hand. Jim looked over his head and nodded. Blair had taken well to the news that Jim had to concentrate on the job he was actually being paid to do, and had borrowed H’s computer to take up the database searches on his own while Jim worked on his official cases. He was almost as fast a typist with one finger as Jim was with ten.

Now, Jim took the fax from Rhonda—six flimsy pages densely printed with names—and set them up so Sandburg could page through them without too much trouble, then returned to his own desk. Blair, he noticed, managed to fish a highlighter out of H’s pencil cup, pried the cap off with his teeth, and wedged it between his thumb and his cast.

Honestly, if G-TAC thought that breaking the kid’s hands was going to slow him down, they clearly had a lot to learn. 

Some time later, Simon called Jim into his office. “What are you working on that you have to get Interpol involved?”

“It’s…kind of a personal project,” Jim admitted. 

“And you’re using department resources for this personal project?”

Simon did not sound happy. “Trying to find Sandburg’s mother,” he explained. “He wants to let her know he’s okay.”

The Captain’s face instantly cleared, like Jim had said the magic words. “Oh. Wouldn’t G-TAC have notified her?”

“If they could find her, maybe. She moves around a lot. We were hoping she might have filed a missing persons report _somewhere_ , but it doesn’t look like she has,” he added, glancing down at the Interpol fax. 

“Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.”

Jim thanked him and returned to his desk. Blair had clearly made a convert of Simon—not that Jim was at all surprised. He was a likeable kid—to everyone except G-TAC and those three other Sentinels, who were clearly out of their minds. 

“Hey, Jim, I think I’ve got something here.” Jim went to look over Blair’s shoulder. He had highlighted a name on the list—well, he had highlighted in the general vicinity of three or four of them, but Jim could make out the name he’d been going for. “She’s a friend of Naomi’s—we stayed over there at Christmas once, actually. She has an apartment that she pays for with actual money, so she might be square enough to have given the police her real phone number.”

“Great.” Jim took the page back to his own desk and looked up the arrest record. There was a New York City address, and a New York phone number. He waved Blair over. “You want to call?”

“Yeah, let’s try it.”

Jim got Blair set up with the receiver and dialed for him, then eavesdropped shamelessly. After several rings, a woman’s voice said, “Hello?”

“Julie?”

“Yes?”

“This is Blair Sandburg—Naomi’s kid?”

“Oh, hi, Blair! How have you been?”

“I’m okay.”

“I haven’t seen your mother in—gosh, it must have been last year. We went to a demo in DC.”

“I haven’t heard from her in a while either—I’m trying to track her down.”

“I had a postcard from her a month or so ago—yeah, she was in Taos. But she wrote on it that she was getting ready to move on.”

“Do you have any idea who she was staying with in Taos?”

“No, I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay. It’s more than I knew a minute ago. Can I give you a number for you to pass along to her if you hear from her?”

“Sure.”

Blair rattled off the house number. “I should be there for a while.”

“What have you been up to? I remember now, she mentioned you had left school suddenly, and she was starting to wonder where you had gotten off to.”

Blair hesitated. “Kind of a long story. I got picked up by the draft.”

“Fuckers! How did you get away?”

“I didn’t. Actually, I’m calling from the police station where I work now.” Blair managed to sound like he thought it was funny.

“Oh my God, Blair…are you all right?”

“Yeah—yeah, I’m fine. If you talk to Naomi, make sure you tell her I’m okay.”

“I will. God. I’ll go through my address book and call everyone from the old crowd, okay? I’m sure someone knows where she is.”

“That would be great. You can give that number to anyone, and let them know they can pass it around, too.”

“Sure. If I call everyone I know, and they call everyone they know, in a few days every old freak in the country will know you’re looking for Naomi, and someone will see her sooner or later.”

“Sort of a counter-culture APB,” Blair agreed with a grin. “That should work. Thanks a lot, Julie. Do me a favor, though?”

“Sure.”

“Don’t spread around the draft part—just that I’m looking for her, that I’m OK, and the number. You know how people are. I don’t want her hearing some outrageous third-hand story and getting all bent out of shape.” 

“Of course, I understand.”

“Thanks a lot. Peace.” Blair tilted his head away from the phone, and Jim caught it and replaced in the cradle. “Did you catch all that?”

“Yeah,” Jim said, wondering what “outrageous story” Blair’s mother could possibly hear that would be worse than what had actually happened. 

“If Julie tells everyone about the draft thing, we’ll have the phone ringing off the hook with people wanting to organize candlelight vigils or something,” he added, with a roll of his eyes. “We don’t need that.”

Jim guessed not. “What’s in Taos?”

“Hm? Oh, an artists’ colony, New Age center, stuff like that. You know, Taos.”

“I see.” A hell of a place to go if your son was missing and you were out of your mind with worry, Jim thought.

“Hey, she could have gone there to try to locate me on the astral plane or something. I mean, to her that would be completely reasonable thing to do. And in her world, being out of touch for a year and a half doesn’t mean anything’s wrong. I could be in Tibet achieving enlightenment, or following a band, or maybe I went on an expedition with the university and decided to stay….” He shrugged. “She left home in the middle of the night when she was about seventeen, dropped out of touch, and didn’t so much as call home until I was about five. A year and a half is nothing.”

“Thought you said she was worried, Chief.” If Sandburg “dropped out of touch” with him for a _day_ and a half, he’d probably have a heart attack.

“She probably is, but if she isn’t, it’s not because she doesn’t love me or whatever. She’s just…a free spirit.” 

Jim nodded. The housekeeper had described his mother that way, trying to explain why she was never around. “I’m sure she does.”

“She does. Anyway, we’ll hear from her soon.”

Jim certainly hoped so. He couldn’t help imagining Blair’s mother—the flakey, thoughtless woman he imagined in his head—hearing about her son’s attempts to locate her, shrugging and walking away. 

#

On Saturday, Jim took Blair to the university library and obtained a Local Resident library card, which cost $25 and allowed Blair to check out up to five books at a time. Jim thought at first that it was $25 _per visit_ , and given the kind of bookstore bills Blair was capable of running up, he thought that was reasonable enough. After he understood that it was $25 for as many books as Blair could read in a year, Jim decided it was the best money he’d ever spent.

Once Blair had the card in hand—or in thumb—Jim followed him around the library for over an hour as he picked out exactly which five he wanted to start with.

“You know, once you finish those, you can bring them back and get others,” Jim pointed out. 

“I know; I just can’t decide where I want to start. I mean, Dr. Stoddard’s book, yeah, but what do I want for the other four?”

Jim kept his mouth shut and followed him around for another hour. He wondered if, for another $25, the library would let him take five more. Probably not. 

They still weren’t done, however, when Blair had finally selected his five books. Blair sat down at a computer and brought up something called J-STOR. 

“What’s that?” Jim wanted to know.

“Article database. I want to see what’s been published in my field since I’ve been gone. But this is what you have to do first, when you look at one of these things.” He typed his own name into the “author” field.

Eight titles popped up. “Hey, look,” Blair said, pointing at one of them with the mouse. “They put my paper in the SCA proceedings, even though I didn’t show up to deliver it.”

“That’s good?”

“Yeah. I’m going to need a copy card.” 

Jim dropped another $25 on a copy card, then spent another hour or so running back and forth between Sandburg’s computer and the printer, picking up articles with titles like, “Sentinel Bonding Rituals of Outer Mongolia.” When he wasn’t doing that, he tried to work his way through Blair’s conference paper. 

Sandburg wrote the way he talked, with lots of asides, digressions, and running-over-at-the-mouth enthusiasm. The key difference was that in writing, he used a lot of words Jim had never heard of before. “So wait,” Jim said, when he got to the end and thought he had a fair idea of what Blair was going on about. “You’re saying here that this tribal Sentinel has a Guide who _isn’t actually a Guide_?”

“Uh-huh,” Blair nodded. “Well, she _is_ a Guide—I mean, she was guiding him—but she doesn’t have the empathic—thing, that we think makes someone a Guide.”

“ _How_?”

“I couldn’t find out as much about that as I wanted to—like I say in there, I was going to go back and try to study them more. They do have traditional Guides, with powers and everything, in their culture—I couldn’t get a straight answer on whether normals working as Guides is a part of their tradition too, or if she stepped in for some kind of emergency. Her mother was the tribe’s holy woman—and I _think_ she was a Guide, too, but I was never clear on that. But she taught her—the holy woman taught this Guide, I mean—a lot of lore, and different techniques to use in place of linking up. She had some potions that she made to suppress the Sentinel’s senses when he wasn’t using them, and some other potions for enhancing them. And there were different things she did to bring him out of zones—if he was zoning on a scent, she’d put a cloth that she’d saturated with her scent in front of his nose, or she’d poke him with this, uh, stick, to kind of shock him out of it. It was really something. I mean, you could sort of see how it wasn’t quite as good as having a real Guide, but it really seemed to work.”

“That’s pretty hard to swallow, Chief.”

“I know. It’s really groundbreaking. Implications way beyond academia—can you imagine if G-TAC had to accept that Sentinels don’t actually need capital-G Guides? I mean, if anyone could learn to do it, they could just take _volunteers_. But I only observed them for a couple of weeks, and I couldn’t get an exact answer on how long they’d been doing it that way—they just said, since the last Guide died, and nobody could say how long ago that was. Maybe it was just a few months, and the guide was just filling in until they could get a real one from another village or something.”

“That sounds a lot more likely.”

“Maybe. Like I say, it’s something I need to study more. One reason I was presenting on it at the conference before I had anything really solid was to find out if anyone had ever seen or heard of anything similar. Lots of people won’t publish anything that weird and tenuous, but they’ll tell you about it in the bar later. After this one prints out, I think I’m done here,” Blair added, clicking on one last article.

While it printed out, Blair backed up to the first search he’d done, the one for his own work. “You wrote all those?” Jim asked.

“These three, I was first author, yeah,” Blair said, pointing. “This one I was second author, and these others I was just part of the _et al_. That means they’re write-ups of someone else’s work where I was one of the research assistants,” he explained. “That’s pretty good, though—lots of people get their PhDs without having any publications as primary author.”

Jim collected the last of Blair’s print-outs, and they checked out the books and left. 

“Oh, man,” Blair said, squinting at the setting sun. “We were in there all day. Sorry, that must have been pretty boring for you.”

Jim shrugged. “It’s okay. I didn’t have any other plans.” Once Blair had the use of his hands back, though, he hoped he’d be able to do something else when Blair felt like spending hours in the library.

Blair bumped his shoulder against Jim’s, smiling up at him. “You know,” he said musingly, “you’re a pretty decent guy.”

“You’re just noticing that, Chief?” Jim teased. 

“No, I noticed it the first day,” Blair said seriously. “I just thought I’d mention it.”

Jim gave him a squeeze, and they got into the truck. 

When they got home, Jim was noticed the message light blinking on the answering machine. He pressed play. “Hello,” a woman’s voice said. “I’m not sure if I have the right number--”

Blair appeared at his side, his heart racing. “Mom?”

The recording continued, “This is Naomi Sandburg. I’m looking for my son, Blair. Blair, honey, I’m so glad you’re all right. I’m at--” Jim quickly scribbled down the number as Naomi recited it on the tape. “I’ll be here for another day or two, at least. If this isn’t the right number, please call back and let me know. Thank you….”

Jim picked up the phone and started dialing. He tucked the phone between Blair’s ear and shoulder, and waited anxiously.

After four rings, someone picked up on the other end. “Hello?”

“Mom? It’s me.”

Jim felt weak with relief, and reached out to steady Blair. “Talk as long as you want, Chief,” he said, patting Sandburg’s shoulder. “I’ll start dinner.”

Moving into the kitchen, he deliberately dialed down his hearing, giving Blair some privacy. 

#

To his surprise, Blair found himself crying as he settled down on the sofa to talk to his mom. “Hey—hey, how have you been?”

“Just fine, sweetie. What have you been doing with yourself.”

“Oh, man,” he said shakily, wondering where to start. “It’s like this….”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Cross Into the Blue](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1143899) by [daniomalley](https://archiveofourown.org/users/daniomalley/pseuds/daniomalley)




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